Love at First Bite

Why do we find ourselves attracted to some foods over others before we have even taken a bite?

By Mary Taylor and Lynn Ginsburg

Food, as one of the primal elements that creates and sustains all life, has the potential to be an object of great beauty. From the perfection of a glistening raspberry tart, to the heady pleasures of a five-course meal in a three-star restaurant, food can reveal the wonder and awe of life. But what makes you perceive a food as beautiful? Though "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," why is it that what I find beautiful you might find appallingly ugly? The artfully decorated chocolate mousse cake that you think is to-die-for might spontaneously cause me to think "I'd rather die than eat that!"

Why you find something attractive or repulsive, beautiful or ugly, delicious or disgusting, has to do with your personal aesthetic or sense of taste. A basic sense of aesthetic is something everyone possesses—we all have a set of preferences. With food, this goes far beyond the tastes you perceive with your tongue. Before you have even taken a bite, you're attracted to some foods over other foods, strongly drawn to this "delicacy," or repulsed by that "trash." But aesthetic is something more than mere preference.

The Indian sage Abhinavagupta proposed that aesthetic was an inborn quality that bursts forth, like a seed that lies dormant until it springs to life when encountering truth or beauty. This bursting or sphota is the internal feeling that lets you know that you are in the presence of true beauty.

The word aesthetic, which means "being responsive to or appreciative of what is beautiful or pleasurable to the senses," is derived from the Sanskrit word avis, which means "before the eyes, openly, manifestly, evidently." The transformation of the word from Sanskrit to modern-day usage reveals a great deal about the difference between the Western idea of aesthetic as that which is pleasurable to the senses, and a more yogic idea of aesthetic as the perception of what is evident. This yogic ideal of aesthetics can be applied to how you approach both food and your asana practice.

Yogic Eating

With asana, your undertaking is to encounter each moment of your practice as something completely new and unknown—each pose, and every movement within each pose, is yet to be discovered. Without a preconceived idea of what the pose should be, or an expectation of what any given moment of your practice should yield, you experience the present moment directly—"manifestly, openly, before the eyes."

To see foods in this way is to discover them anew every time you eat. Consider how differently you approach a food you've never eaten before, as compared to foods you eat often. When something is new, all of your senses are heightened, as you determine whether or not you like a food. You notice everything about it—how it smells, feels, and looks. When you take the first bite, you pause to evaluate the flavors before deciding to have more or not to eat it at all.

This wonder and discovery of food as you eat it in the present moment is how you measure the food against your own inner food aesthetic. But when you've eaten a food before, or are tasting foods that you have labeled—gourmet, fattening, dietetic, sinful—you'll tend to eat out of habit. You miss out on the truth of the food as it unfolds in the present moment.

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