Druidry and Food
Eating is one of the most fundamentally natural things we do. It is an everyday opportunity to engage with our bodies, and to be alert to the relationship between our bodies, and the natural world. For a Druid this is territory rich in potential.
Like many people, my lifelong relationship with food is problematic. Fat-shaming featured heavily in my childhood, although having dug out some old photos, I was never especially fat. I was encouraged to feel guilty about enjoying food, and fearful of the threat of fatness. I ate badly in my teens – poor nutrition, failed attempts at starving myself in a desire to be thin. I became fearful of eating around other people. In my twenties, food became part of the power balance in a truly unhealthy relationship. I’ve also had my relationship with food undermined by poverty and sourcing issues.
It’s really only in recent years that I’ve been able to eat exactly as I please and feel safe while doing so. I’ve discovered how much I enjoy raw, fresh things, how much I prefer a diet dominated by plant matter. Wholegrains. Diversity, experimentation and messing about have become options for me. I’ve started to enjoy cooking. I’ve done a lot of cooking – as a matter of duty. Only in recent years as my relationship with food has changed have I been able to enjoy thinking about meals, planning food, and I’ve come to truly enjoy making and sharing food as well.
Food can be a creatively expressive form. It can be inspired, and we can bring our sense of the sacred to what we eat. Meals can be a good basis for social connections and for family life, so if community is part of your Druidry, food is a way of approaching that. People who eat together form bonds. Companions are, etymologically speaking, people who share bread. That can be a ritual thing, but is just as powerful in other contexts.
Food can be part of how we do our activism – in our dietary choices and how we source what we eat. It brings us into contact with the soil, with other living beings and with the state of the planet.
Eating engages us with our fundamentally animal selves. It gives us opportunity to honour nature in our own bodies. To be embodied in your nature based spirituality is to resist body-shaming, food shaming and fat shaming. It strikes me as inherently Druidic to seek the balances between personal health, environmental health, joy and celebration when it comes to food.
