The satisfaction of hunger is of course one of life’s primary needs, perhaps the most basic and the most important.

Earlier this week I noticed that I had consumed a first mouthful of food without tasting it.

In swallowing without tasting perhaps I was inherently focused on satisfying my hunger at that particular moment.

But, hold on a minute, I’m hardly starving, it can’t be that long since I last ate something, I am fortunate that my food supply is constant and guaranteed unlike for so many in this world who go hungry.

In swallowing my food without tasting, I deprive myself of a key aspect of the process of eating, which prior to being swallowed is the mastication and tasting of the food.

Tasting is to enhance the food experience, it is to widen the process of eating from basic function to a higher level.

To taste, is to go on a journey of the mind, to feel the heat, to enjoy the flavour, to experience the texture of the food before it is dispatched to sustain life.

I think swallowing without tasting is akin to reducing my life to a mechanism, to a process and it is to deny the opportunity within my life for noticing the world; for being in the world;  for living fully in the world.

To swallow without tasting is to risk a life lived as an existence, rather than a life lived as an experience, with periods of darkness and light which deepens the  very essence  of our limited time on this beautiful earth.

My next blog will be: Overstretched

William Defoe