Women Food and God

Women Food and God PROLOGUE

The World on Our Plates
Eighty hungry women are sitting in a circle with bowls of cold tomato vegetable soup; they are glowering at me, furious. It is lunchtime on the third day of the retreat. During these daily eating meditations each woman approaches the buffet table, lines up to be served, takes her seat in the circle, and waits until we all sit down to eat. The process is agonizingly slow-fifteen minutes or so-especially if food is your drug of choice.

Although the retreat is going well and many people here have had life-changing insights, at this moment no one cares. They don't care about stunning breakthroughs or having ninety pounds to lose or whether God exists. They want to be left alone with their food, period. They want me to take my fancy ideas about the link between spirituality and compulsive eating and go away. It is one thing to be conscious about food in the meditation hall, and another to be sitting in the dining room, refraining from taking even one bite until the entire group has been served. Also, I've asked that silence be observed, so there are no frissons of laughter or chatty how-are-yous to distract attention from hunger or lack of it, since not everyone is hungry.

The retreat is based on a philosophy I've developed over the past thirty years: that our relationship to food is an exact microcosm of our relationship to life itself. I believe we are walking, talking expressions of our deepest convictions; everything we believe about love, fear, transformation and God is revealed in how, when and what we eat. When we inhale Reese's peanut butter cups when we are not hungry, we are acting out an entire world of hope or hopelessness, of faith or doubt, of love or fear. If we are interested in finding out what we actually believe-not what we think, not what we say, but what our souls are convinced is the bottom-line truth about life and afterlife-we need go no further than the food on our plates. God is

Geneen Roth is the author of ten books, including the New York Times bestsellers When Food Is Love, Lost and Found, and Women Food and God, as well as The Craggy Hole in My Heart and the Cat Who Fixed It. She has been speaking, teaching groundbreaking workshops, and offering retreats for over thirty years and has appeared on numerous national shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, 20/20, the Today show, Good Morning America, and The View. For more information about her work, please visit GeneenRoth.com