Rotten Food for a Rotten Soul

Within the modern world, it has become commonplace to allow our consumption habits to define us. Often when asked to talk a little bit about ourselves we will hastily fire off a list of various TV shows we watch, cuisines we enjoy, or destinations we would like to visit. Our identities, strictly speaking, have become smorgasbords of consumer references and personal vices, outside of such things, we’re left a little lost at who it is we even are. The common way of unspooling this problem is to separate our consumptive habits from our egos, and then try to do a deep dive into what our ‘self’ even is. Rarely, however, do we stop to look at many of the presumptions we are accepting when we do this. We never wonder whether or not those consumerist past-times we quickly put to the wayside caused us any long-lasting harm. But in much the same way we can ingest a tainted meal that causes us prolonged physiological distress, so too can we ingest a rotten piece of sense data that attaches itself to our souls, fouling them long into our future. I am writing about food in the abstract. Our reality of impressions as separate types of food which can all be equally digested or seen for their inherent lack of wholesome content. We have been taught to discern the difference in nutritional value between a packet of crisps and steak and eggs, but never are we taught to perceive sensual nutritional differences between a skyscraper and a forest, the ocean or a TikTok video, or between a Twitter feed and a book. We need to start thinking universally gastronomically.

When we think of food, we tend to think of plates filled with delicious meats and cheeses, bowls of soup with steam rising from them, and possibly great feasts laid out before us. Within our hedonistic, apathetic, and fast-paced world, our relationship with food stops at the lips. If one was to ask what sort of ‘food’ is going to be supplied at an upcoming event, they would expect an answer detailing cuisine and little else. Food, for moderns, is what we bung in our mouths in fleeting moments of sensory enjoyment, and therein think of it no more. Food, despite our obsession with intensifying it to the nth degree, remains solely within the realm of material, never allowed full digestion, and forever reined in, kept prisoner to the psyches of the soulless. And yet, despite its loss of importance, we are almost always eating some kind of food, whether we like it or not.

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If we’re to truly understand the general concept of food, we must begin to grasp it in relation to two ideas, namely, experience and digestion. Firstly, all kinds of foods are experienced. One cannot - as hard as some reviewers may try - describe, write, or detail the experience of food. Experience and the language describing experience will forever be different, often separated by a vast chasm. Secondly, digestion. All kinds of foods are digested. We place or shove certain dishes and treats into our mouths, chew for a while, swallow, and then, passively, allow that pulp to be digested and thus utilized by our bodies as a form of fuel. Food seeps into us and quite literally becomes who we are. As the oft-repeated saying goes, You are what you eat!

This is all relatively innocent thus far, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing which might cause us to slow down and think about the very act of digestion. But what if we were to ‘expand’ our understanding of food? If, once again, we are to understand food as something which is experienced and then digested, there are clearly other forms of food. Or at least, there are experiences that we take in and then digest. The media we consume, the architecture we awake to each morning, the music on the radio, the smell of the supermarket, and even our incessant glimpses at our phones are minute forms of food.

This isn’t a new idea. In fact, it can’t be a new or ‘modern’ idea because it is inherently not secular. This is an alchemical idea that removes food from being solely understood on the material level. It opens our horizon of understanding, allowing us to address the different ways in which our bodies, psyches, and souls are being affected by various ongoing digestions. And so we ask, where did such an idea arise?

If we are to go back to some of the earliest examples of figures one might consider ‘esoteric’, we have, firstly, Pythagoras. Largely known as a mathematician within the modern world, Pythagoras was in truth one of the first mystics and understood the importance of food when it came to concocting what he entitled ‘The Meal of Hercules’[1], which he utilized primarily for mental clarity. Following this we have one of the great healers of history, Claudius Galenus, commonly known as Galen, of the third century AD, espousing a view that diet, and especially digestion, was of the utmost importance regarding health. As we move into the era of the Early Christians, we begin to find rules on fasting, meat, and food in relation to the great chain of being. Moving swiftly through the Middle Ages we find an abundance of literature on religious fasting and herbalism. As we enter into the Enlightenment and the Early Modern period we find a resurgence of esoteric diet advice from the likes of Mesmer, Levi, and Blavatsky. And finally, in terms of actual food-based esoteric advice we find in the work of Rudolf Steiner and George Gurdjieff, possibly our most recent connection to a spiritual - and most importantly, non-materialistic - understanding of food. As it stands, and as I made clear at the beginning, the modern world isn’t one for opening itself to an understanding of food which is more expansive than its material elements. Food, for moderns, is mouth-taste alone. Our appreciation of food, despite a vast historical foundation that says otherwise, stops at the plate. But what does this alt-food history have to teach us?

However, first, we still need to know what exactly food is. The question of the ‘what’ of food outside of its material boundaries? The place where the very concept of food becomes important for any type of creation and especially social, civilizational, and architectural development. For Gurdjieff[2] -

The human organism receives three kinds of food:

1. The ordinary food we eat

2. The air we breathe

3. Our impressions.

Everything needed for the continuation of our material life is afforded to us from the outside, but so too is everything needed for our psychological and spiritual life. It is not only that we are materially what we eat, but so too are we psychologically and spiritually what we eat. And what is it we are ‘eating’?

Firstly we have the ordinary food which I have already described. This is familiar to us all, as we quite literally need it as the fuel which keeps our material body working. And yet, even within this first ‘layer’ of food, most of us would understand that there are different levels of sustenance and nutrition, and that the ingestion of certain types of these ordinary foods is better than others. There is also the question of digestion throughout all these foods. Are we rushing our meals? Are we wolfing them down and not letting them truly enter into us and sustain us?

Secondly, we have the air that we breathe. Now, firstly, we can understand the air that we breathe on a material level. Is it full of pollution, plastic, smog, etc.? An understanding much like ordinary food. But secondly, also akin to ordinary foods, there is the pace at which we consume air. Is our respiration fast or slow? Are we asking ourselves the question of which locations cause a change in our breathing rate? This leads me to the third, and, for this essay, most important food, impressions.

Thirdly, then, impressions. Impressions are what we take in via sight, sound, and/or touch. Impressions differ quite drastically in intensity, for they have the ability to levitate us to the heights of heaven, or quickly plummet us to the depths of hell. Sitting in front of your PC in an office whilst muzak plays is an impression, a sunset amidst solitude is an impression, a beautiful morning Mass is an impression, and the garbage truck blaring out rap music at 7 am…is an impression. But, much like ordinary food, we have put a lot of effort into secularizing impressions as a possible form of food, once again reducing them solely to the realm of the material.

The 9-5 office grind is seen as something we materially ‘drive away’ from at the end of the day, the sunset is something we snap a picture of before it disappears, the Mass will come again next Sunday, and the rap music will quickly pass. And yet, if we’re to understand all these impressions and events as food, then we are to understand that they are experiences that have therefore since been digested, they are now, to a lesser and greater degree, part of our very being. And, despite being the food that is rarely considered as such, impressions are - whilst we are alive - incessant. We can live a few days without ordinary food, and a few minutes without air, but without impressions we would cease to exist. In this sense, without realizing it, we are constantly eating, constantly experiencing, and constantly digesting. Man is perpetually becoming who he is via the act of digestion.

It is this theory which I turn to when I try to understand the difference between the countryman and the urbanite, between the king and the peasant, between a consciousness of the past and a consciousness of the future. The so-called rural bumpkin fed a slow but rich diet of expansive fields, patient birdsong, and rustic, muddy air. An impression diet that leaves him calm, allows him to sink to the root of matters and attend to life realistically. To turn to the urbanite, however, we see a different picture altogether. Weaned at the teat of run-down brutalist relics, the ceaseless feedback of thousand-and-one backpack speakers, and the searing burn of neon hues. The urbanite is fed a diet of artificial stimulation from birth. The ordinary equivalents of such diets are akin to a lamb stew vs. an energy drink; a ploughman’s lunch vs. a Tesco meal deal; a roast dinner vs. an instant noodle pot. We can, loosely, begin to see how such diets might affect someone’s outlook, but what of their souls? For if such ordinary diets would rot teeth and gut, it figures that on a spiritual level, such impressions might cause the equivalent kind of non-material damage.

To move to the work of Rudolf Steiner, primarily his book Nutrition: Food, Health, and Spiritual Development, we can understand man, or more precisely, the human body, as a tool of the spirit. Yet from this position, it’s clear that our general understanding of food, and thus nutrition and digestion, has a dangerous material emphasis. For if we only understand all foods as solely material, then it follows that all they can affect is the health of our physical body and that such things as spirit, soul, and mind are affected by something which is somehow outside of us, and yet not food? Surely such a thing cannot be, and we must attend to all that we ingest from the understanding of food. In the same way, we may curate a physically nutritious meal of meat, veg, and milk, so too might we wish to curate a spiritually nutritious atmosphere composed of oak trees, soft architecture, and pleasant pathways.

But lo-and-behold, the secular moderns will likely march forward once more and declare that ‘It is only the connotations said material brings about!’ Such people could not believe a Church more than its material, a rustic route more than its mud, or a sunset more than its hues. Such a world leaves us in a state of deconstruction, where development is only a matter of empirical measurements, as opposed to atmosphere, emotion, and spirit. This might seem overly sentimental, but to give an example in the form of a cantankerous statement - There is no such thing as a renewable forest. - Such a proclamation seems absurd, and yet, if we are to cut a forest down and attempt to replant it, even with each tree replanted in the exact place of its felled forebear, we would soon find that it is not the same forest, and the spirit that once was has been lost.

This same spirit is the form of food that permeates all things. Sunsets, oceans, skyscrapers, gutters, ripe apples, PC monitors, doorbells, car handles, oak trees, or coffee cups. Each of these, as with all things, exists on the negative-to-positive spectrum of spirit, each is in itself a food in the form of an impression, seeping into us as an experience, and quickly being digested and becoming a facet of our personal being. We live in such a materially focused world that we have study after study written on the effects of overconsuming junk food, but that self-same world explicitly omits studies on the overconsumption of ‘junk architecture’, or ‘junk music’, or ‘junk technology’. We state with confidence that eating sweets every day is bad for you, all whilst we glare at our phones wandering aimlessly through a repetitive suburban nightmare.

And what if now we are to think of our daily diets? We constantly check ourselves in relation to what sorts of edible foods we ingest. Are we eating too much fat? Too little carbohydrates? Are we avoiding seed oils? etc. But this very same nutritional logic must be applied to everything else within our lives too. For as a walk in a country park may be akin to a wholesome stew, a ceaseless TikTok scrolling session resonates as a petulant junk food binge session. If one was to sit at a desk each night and eat only sweets, crisps, and pastries, we might tell them that such a way of living is extremely unhealthy. Our focus would be centered on the strictly physiological character of their life. And yet if someone is to sit at their desk each night and scroll unendingly between riot videos, memes, and serotonin-inducing rage posts, we would only stretch as far as to say they need to find something else to do, or that they need to get a life. But as the former junk-food binge would increasingly cause long-lasting effects on bodily health, so too does the latter digital dopamine blitz affect our literal souls, causing prolonged indigestion and health problems.

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We have intellectual, spiritual, and cultural indigestion. When you eat too much regular food you find yourself sitting with your trousers unbuttoned, patting your belly. You know that you need to give your bodily digestive processes and organs some time to catch up with your gastronomic oversight. Yet, here we sit, reading book after book, glaring at meme after meme, and ingesting data-point after data-point, not once sitting back and allowing our minds or hearts the much-needed time to even begin to apprehend what it is they’ve just taken in. Social media acts here as the banquet par excellence for our modern appetites. An eternal, self-created, and self-honed feast of impressions, taken in without thought for blockage.

We may ask ourselves that if such is the case, why hasn’t anyone as of yet developed a diet for such a malady? The truth is many people have, but they’re incorrectly formatted. As is the rage at the moment, countless highly-online people are promoting the benefits of digital detoxes, No Surf diets, or dopamine fasts. All of these have been composed to allow us to see how deeply and parasitically our commonplace digital habits have affected our minds. I believe that such ‘diets’ are misplaced because they treat our newfound modern habits as qualitatively different from the rest of the world. As if scrolling on Twitter, checking Instagram, or being attached at the hip to our smartphones is in some way a different type of worldly interaction than any other. Gastronomically speaking, there is no abstract difference in action between a TikTok feed and a swim in the ocean. Both fill our time, both allow us to receive certain impressions, and both are among many of the actionable choices we can make on any given day. Speaking of their content, however, is a different matter altogether. We all instinctively know that a swim in the sea is of far greater worth to our well-being than checking social media, we just don’t know how to approach a reasonable axiom as to why this exactly is. Perceiving our actions, habits, and impressions as food is such an answer.

We say to our friend who is smoking ‘That’s bad for you, you should quit.’ Physiologically it is clear why this is correct. We - might - say to our friend who is addicted to their phone ‘Man, you’re on that all the time, you should take a break.’ yet we’re not quite sure as to why this is. It’s quite simple - as man ingests tobacco and destroys his lungs, so too does a man ingest his social feeds and destroy his soul. If such a position seems far-fetched, let us turn to the work of Ioan Couliano

On the other hand, the body opens up to the soul a window to the world through the five sensory organs whose messages go to the same cardiac apparatus which now is engaged in codifying them so that they may become comprehensible. Called phantasia or inner sense, the sidereal spirit transforms messages from the five senses in phantasms perceptible to the soul. (5) [3]

Couliano spends his entire work Eros and Magic in the Renaissance detailing exactly how it is that sense impressions become transformed and perceptible to the soul. Revealing that the exact same science and magic utilized by prideful sorcerers within the Renaissance to control the desires of man is functionally the very same ‘magic’ we call advertising, publicity, or programming. Our five sense windows to the world allow us to take in - ingest - a constant stream of messages, impressions, sounds, smells, feelings, and ultimately foods. Each in turn becomes perceptible to the soul and taints in either a positive or negative light. Such magical operations placed into the hands of mass-media sorcerers technologically accelerates the proliferation of rotten food to the nth degree.

Technology, it can be said, is a democratic magic that allows everyone to enjoy the extraordinary capabilities of which the magician used to boast. (104) [3]

Of course, for us moderns, these sorts of ideas seem entirely out of place, irrational, or ridiculous even. Starting with the Cartesian mind-body split and ending with the secular crises of modernity, any such vocabulary that would allow us to confront our problem of indigestion for what it is, has been all but destroyed. It is often heralded at the start of pulp horror novels that it needn’t matter if you believe in the monsters, all that counts is that they believe in you. The same applies to magic. You may not wish to call it such, you may even deride the concept of the soul, seeking to replace it with the ‘Real’ or the ‘authentic’. But whatever word games one plays, the facts at hand don’t change - We have been given access to (magical) technological apparatuses which cause the feeling of indigestion to become addictive. Processes that rewire our digestive faculties of reasoning and perception to become accustomed to being full and yet still crave more.

At last, we come to our fate. Dopamine-addicted, impression-bloated pawns caught in a globe-wide food casino. And as with all casino architecture, it seeks to have you believe that there is no outside world and that all which is afforded you is in truth all that there is. Promoting the notion that all values, aesthetics, and tastes can be flattened and subsumed into personal streams of data, available to each and every one of us at the touch of a button. If we are, then, to return to that oh-so-famous saying ‘You are what you eat’, we can begin to notice that rarely do we focus on what it is we are actually eating, but solely become obsessed with who we ‘are’. Not once do we stop to think that it may just be that all is food, thereby all is us, and thus we are little more than the latest breadcrumb thrown from the table of malevolent techno-sorcerers.

[1] The Secret Teachings of All Ages, Manly P Hall, p196

[2] In Search of the Miraculous, P.D. Ouspensky, p181

[3] Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, Ioan Couliano, p5, p104