Hot Buttered Toast – cravings + pavings
Getting curious about the things we hanker after and what they're communicating to us – PLUS an Earthy booklist, for those who need to get lost in Nature
When it’s cold, cold, cold… ice-brittle… the layers build up, sometimes even sleeping in my heavy dressing gown of a night, when the cottage simply can’t keep out Jack Frost’s icy fingers.
Food must be warm, unctuous, spiced (though gently so). I crave cacao – with full-fat nut or seed milks – and will sweeten with a sip of maple syrup or pinch jaggery or raw, dark brown sugar, if I have some in the cupboard (muscovado is good, too).
I don’t want it sweet though… the bitterness is pleasing… and the bitterness helps shift winter’s weight… it’s cold and damp cloak… lifting heaviness with something greener, sharper, but not raw or crunchy, just yet… that’s for Spring.
Why do I crave carrots? A grated, juicy-sweet carrot salad, or fresh carrot juice, sometimes with beetroot, and sometimes with apple, or both… when my body has been too busy… when things feel a little out of sync, and these tastes speak to me of Earth… of rootedness, of goodness.
I remember a winter when I commuted every day, and I craved that carrot and beetroot mix half-madly… depleted, needing replenishment. I then read, today, of the ability of carrots to bring balance to our hormones… and I think of how we oversimplify and make one simple, common sense thing, suddenly a fad… and everyone is buying up their carrots or avocados or kale, and we miss the necessary nuance. The nudges from our own bodies. A way to eat that feeds the whole of us.
What do I crave today? Apples. The glossy crunchy ones that just arrived in our veg box. More fruit. Vitamin C. Pineapple, oddly, I crave a lot. The bromelain within – its own special enzyme – is a wonderful anti-histamine. It helps with my annual hay fever struggles. I wonder if I crave it now because it is anti-inflammatory, and living through Winter, with its central heating, its sweetness and excess, its heaviness and damp, my body is looking for support in different ways… in the bitter beside the sour. The bitter-sweetness of a pomegranate, too. And sourness of a cranberry.
And this all tells me that there is a mixture of kapha (the water-earth elements and characteristics of Nature) alongside Vata (the ether-air elements), and that doesn’t surprise me, because it has been pincer-cold and slapping-windy, but also heavily wet, by turns, all winter… and these fluctuations make themselves known through my cravings, my skin, my feelings, my body and mind. What other secrets is my body letting me into?
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