Food yoga
 

Being a food lover in your mid-40s involves carrying something of an occupational health burden. Like many men of substance I keep my cholesterol low with statins. I also keep my blood pressure under control. This is achieved in part by a daily 20mg of Lisinopril and partly by avoiding reading things like this in the NYT:

“The words of Ziggy Marley’s ‘Love Is My Religion’ floated over 30 people lying on yoga mats in a steamy, dim loft above Madison Avenue on Friday. All had signed up for a strange new hybrid of physical activity: first an hour of vigorous, sweaty yoga, then a multicourse dinner of pasta, red wine and chocolate … dinner was served on the floor: an (almost) seamless transition designed to allow the yogis to taste, smell and digest in a heightened state of awareness.”

I mean, when you can actually see the veins in your temples throbbing out of the corner of your eye, that’s not right is it?

My rage, I’m aware, is not even faintly rational. If I worried about everything that people who willingly eat wheatgrass do in lofts above Madison Avenue, my brain would have burst years ago, but there’s something about the notion of ‘foodie yoga’ that just pushes all my buttons and I’ve been trying, in a spirit of the mindfulness, to work out why.

In truth, I’m sorry to admit, my reaction is one of jealous protectionism. I’m fully prepared to believe that hours spent in solipsistic bendiness makes these chakra-botherers better at sex than me – I mean they’re thin, flexible, good at self-denial and can probably sharpen pencils with their pubococcygeus muscles. If it didn’t involve shagging people with the uncalibrated self-regard of Sting we’d all be up for a slice of that. But, please people, for the love of the Bodhisattva, can’t you leave food alone? If – and it’s a sodding great ontological stonker of an ‘if’- one can really achieve a heightened state of awareness through yoga that actually makes things taste better then I’ve entirely lost my carefully constructed superiority.

I’ve worked most of my life building the unshakeable belief that I’m better than the whipcord-muscled love-god with the seraphic smile and the lycra shorts. This is not because I can hold my breath for a month or drop out all eight inches of my rectum for a hand-wash but because I can do something he can’t: I can in a very real sense, both physically and emotionally, get off on a bacon roll.

Being a food lover – a proper, committed, according-to-Hoyle, paid up nosher – means wanting to eat beyond prudence or self-preservation. I still retain a hearty distrust of anyone who feels they can balance their appetites and wellbeing without sacrificing either – it strikes at the gnarled trunk of my belief system. I can’t believe there is balance – only a lifelong and agonising battle. If I believed in balance I’d have to believe there was virtue in moderation and that I will not, cannot do.

So please, WoM readers, uncoil yourselves from that Adho Mukha Svanasana, put down that fried egg bap and help me out here. Can one truly be a yogi and a foodie? Is it possible to practice the five abstentions while still enjoying a cheeky little merlot? Can we respect all living things while mindfully necking a steak?

I really need to know, because if these New Yorkers are onto something, I’m going to get the mat out and start chanting.

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