Enjoyment.

Edward espouses enjoyment ...

Too often the rigorous aspects of mind demand overcompliance, insisting that there will be no lightness.  These aspects also imply that our inherent being lacks wisdom or any sense of beauty and consequently needs to be kept in line, restrained, tamed, subdued.  For most of us, as we get in touch with our inner aesthetic, we learn to set aside what is not in accord with it.  When we stop beating ourselves up, we begin to notice our inherent sweetness of heart.

Many problems that arise in the pursuit of pleasure are due to a lack of devotion, to not being fully enough committed to pleasure, to connection.  We put the problem on the object by labeling it sinful or decadent rather than acknowledging how we lose ourselves.  Which bite of chocolate cake is no longer pleasurable?  Which swallow of wine is bringing us down instead of up?  Sure, restraint and discipline are needed, but not to deny pleasure, rather to curb excitement and greed when it runs away with us.  Use restraint as needed for braking, rather than keeping the brakes on as a way of life!

Please enjoy your food.  When pleasure or enjoyment are harshly forbidden, we look for stupor, for unconsciousness, which is the closest we can get to relief from the misplaced drive to discipline and restraint and overriding admonition not to have fun.  "Watch yourself!  If I catch you having fun, I'll make you pay for it."  Most often we come by these negative admonitions honestly through or early experiences in life.  Still, it is not too late to change, to enjoy our food.

Edward Espe Brown, from No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice

Jim agrees ...

Throughout the day we mulled over the not-exactly-metaphysical question of why we never, for more than a moment, allowed ourselves to be hungry. Could this possibly be why we were both seriously overweight? But only a fool jumps to negative conclusions about food, especially before dinner. Cuisine minceur notwithstanding, the quality of food diminishes sharply in proportion to negative thinking about ingredients and, simply put, the amount to be prepared. There is no substitute for Badia a Coltibuono olive oil. Period. Or the use of salt pork in the cooking of southwest France. Three ounces of chablis are far less interesting and beneficial than a magnum of Bordeaux. I have mentioned before that we are in the middle of yet another of the recurrent sweeps across our nation of the "less is more" bullies. When any of these arrive in my yard, I toss a head of iceberg lettuce and some dog biscuits off the porch.

Let's all stop for a moment in our busy day and return to some eternal verities. It's quite a mystery, albeit largely unacknowledged, to be alive, and, quite simply, in order to remain alive you must keep eating. My notion, scarcely original, is that if you eat badly you are very probably living badly. You tend to eat badly when you become inattentive to all but the immediate economic necessities, real or imagined, and food becomes an abstraction; you merely "fill up" in the manner that you fill a car with gasoline, no matter that some fey grease-slinger has put raspberry puree on your pen-raised venison. You are still a nitwit bent over a trough.

Jim Harrison,  from "Hunger, Real and Unreal"