| For many in the current American culture, food and its significance to their lives has been relegated to biology and chemistry. Our attitude toward food has also convinced us that our bodies are like machines that simply need to be refueled by the appropriate vitamins and minerals without regard to the spiritual, emotional, psychological, and social needs. Because of this, for most Americans, food production, preparation, and eating have lost much of its soul, its essence and spiritual spark. This inquiry will look deeply into the transformative nature of our food processes and will try to discover how and why through modern technology, prevailing cultural beliefs and attitudes, much of the technological food that is now being eaten has become devoid of soul. The historical-social-religious ramifications of this denial of soul within our food will be investigated. From this important penetration into the pathological symptoms that have risen in our culture today a sacred space of possibilities will be reclaimed so as to inject myth, meaning, image, fantasy, and dream back into our food rituals. Consequently, a new vision of the essences of food---with self, community, nature, the divine, and anima mundi---will be imagined, thus, soul can be remembered, reclaimed and restored in our human connection to food.;This dialogical dissertation, The Alchemy of Food, is a theoretical study with a critical hermeneutic approach from a depth psychological perspective. By its very nature, the eating of food is an alchemical and transformative experience. A parallel will be drawn from the alchemical stages of nigredo, calcinatio, solutio, coagulatio, sublimatio, mortificatio, separatio, and coniunctio and the food cycle which will consist of: producing, preparing, cooking, presenting, blessing, eating, digesting, and metabolizing of food. The reconnection of the soul will be the continuous focus. |
