Grokking Food

In my Sociology class, I recently had to do what Dr. Helford calls a Zen Experiment. The basics of the experiment is to study my dinner for five minutes before eating. When I eat, not to use any type of utensils, and to be experiencing the process. Then I had to go to the bathroom and study the toilet for ten minutes. Finally, after that ten minutes, I dump some of my food in the toilet... look at it... then flush. I had to also turn in a report for this. This Zen Experiment was called Grokking Food. "Do you grok me," is the wordless question that our food is asking silently asking by just existing. If you anything like me, at first you might not know what grok means. It originally came from Robert Heinlein’s book Strangers in a Strange Land. The author used the word grok to literally mean “to drink” in the Martian language. Within the book, a character describes it this way:

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because we are from Earth) as color means to a blind man.

Grokking is the act of trying to understand and identify with something or someone. During the course of the Grokking Food Zen experiment, I did not come to any major revelations, only some interesting thoughts.

When I received the Grokking Food assignment, I showed it to some of my friends and we had a good laugh about how weird it was. Prior to cooking the food that would be used for the experiment, I put a good amount of thought into what I would use. I did not want to eat something that would be too gross to eat with my fingers. Top Roman seemed to be a good choice, and something that I eat quite often. To the basic Creamy Chicken Top Roman I added butter, an egg, and cut-up hunks of meat. I have known for a while that Top Roman is unhealthy, but I have never taken much time to stare or think a lot about it. Looking at the bowl of food, made me start to loose my appetite. I even started thinking about the digestive process. I noticed that the noodles looked suspiciously like the small intestines. Coating the edges of the bowl and the outskirts of the noodles was a greasy yellow liquid, which sloshed around slightly when I picked up the bowl for a closer inspection. On the meat and noodles were small black specks, most likely seasoning. I took a little bit of time and focused past the noodles, looking at them as if they were some sort of hidden picture. All I saw was a blurred and formless blob. My mind kept returning to thoughts of preservatives and chemicals known to be within my dinner. After the five minutes of observation time, I squished the bowl in-between my hands, and tipped it back. The noodles were incorporative, and stuck to the walls of the bowl. For a second, I had freighting of my dipping my bear hands into the bowl, and shoving handfuls of the sludge into my mouth. The very idea of that was horrendous; I wanted no part in it. I maneuvered my face into the small confines of the bowl. The thought of removing my mouth with stings of Roman dangling from my beard popped into my head. I tipped the bowl back again, and tried to suck another mouthful of food in. Interestingly it was more of a chore to be accomplished to eat the food, then a satisfying meal. Normally I enjoy eating, and try to savor the food, but with this I just wanted to get it over with. I also found myself eating at a much faster pace then normal.

The next segment of the experiment was to go the bathroom and study the toilet. Looking at the toilet, I started thinking about how long ago it’s last cleaning was. It took everything within me to not go and quickly grab some cleaning supplies and clean the toilet as a part of my observations. Thinking on this note, got me to realize how neglected the toilet is. The toilet is just a product for utility. The toilet is only thought of when needed, and then quickly left by the wayside. After the ten minutes was on my timer, I dumped the bowl of excess food into the toilet. Inside the toilet bowl, the food just floated and half sunk. Food like this is an utterly disgusting sight. After looking at the food, and the swirling cloud floating in the water, I pushed the handle down and flushed the toilet.

Grokking my food, is in a sense the closest that I have had come to my food. Eating is something that takes a lot of preparation and time everyday, but is rarely thought about. Really, the utility of just eating food, even if we enjoy it, is similar to the utility of using the toilet. It is something that I under normal circumstances do not want to think about. My mom has told me about the importance of being mindful in daily life, but rarely do I actually implement it. It is difficult to really concentrate on what is going on, and not just be on autopilot or thinking about a million other topics. Mindfulness is experience life as it happens, in the moment. It also seems there are two different “digestion processes” that we use frequently. First, is the process eating and deposing of food physically. Second, is the ingestion of our waste into the toilet and it’s digestion into various pipes and other avenues under our cities until it is it find its way our of our system. So the question must be, do you ever grok your food?