A Memorable Coffee and the real importance of food-A Personal Experience

Think about it just for a moment, what does food really mean to you?

Is  food just nourishment or is it something more? Is food linked with certain people in your life? Is food emotionally charged for you? Does food link you with certain places? 


And finally, how do you observe meals and meals times in your life? 

The answers to each of these questions, may actually surprise you and tell you more about yourself than you possibly realised.

 A well known speaker, Revd John Pritchard, (Oxford) says:“For me the importance of food operates at a number of different levels. Food is fuel; it keeps me alive and active (well, reasonably!). At the next level, food is enjoyable, particularly when eaten three times a day, breaking up the long hours with periods of refreshment.Food is an opportunity to demonstrate hospitality and to enable more serious conversation to take place. The final level for me is that food is a spiritual issue, seen in scripture, in many of the images of the Kingdom of Heaven, and in the central act of the Christian Church, Holy Communion.”

To all of the above, I will add that while food is sometimes impossible to eat when one is worried and anxious, it becomes a source of warmth and comfort after the immediate source of stress is removed. And its not that I haven't thought about or realised all this earlier, its just that this fact has been even more strongly reinforced after my mother's recent high risk surgery at Medanta Medicity.

Three of us my father, brother and myself had spent many anxious hours waiting while the surgery was on. I really don't remember if we ate or drank anything during those five hours, but I do remember the overwhelming sense of relief after we learnt that it was finally over and that Mummy had recovered consciousness. 

The memorable coffee and muffin shared by my father soon after Mummy's surgery

While Navtej chose to have a soft drink, both of us ordered a coffee each and shared a blueberry muffin. ''Manna from heaven'' would probably be a very cliched term in normal circumstances, but that's not what we felt then.

 It was all of that ..and more!'

Life goes on, Mummy is still in the ICU, making a slow but sure recovery, but this coffee and muffin will always remain one of the most memorable meals in our lives...