Euphoria from food
I feel a euphoria when eating fresh fruits and vegetables, in particular my famous no-packaging vegan stews.
It’s subtle enough to miss if I’m talking to someone or listening to a podcast, but wonderful. I’d pick it over the high from things refined from plants like coca, poppy, etc since I can do it every day my whole life with no unwanted side effects. It gives me plenty of wanted ones, like eating to full every meal and having defined abs, despite congenital conditions that if I eat more calories than I burn or excrete, I put on weight and that I almost can’t stop eating until I’m full.
I suspect the feeling comes from the slow release of sugar and maybe fat. It would make sense for humans to have evolved to feel reward from eating healthy edible things around them. That was then. Today, higher profits come from refining the sugar and fat out, as with coca and poppy extracts, to give intense, immediate pleasure from the refined stuff like from candy. As a result, our culture provides more of the refined stuff, what I call doof.
That sensory overload dulls our senses to that mild euphoria. It took a while to develop the sensitivity to it after decades of ice cream and chips. Now I love it. Eating is more than just nourishment. It’s a euphoric, relaxing joy.
I don’t know how the picture below looks to others. It’s a collection of typical local fall vegetables. To me before learning to shop and cook, I wouldn’t know what to make of them. To me now, it’s flavors and textures I can’t wait to taste, mix, cook, ferment, and enjoy. It took months of just eating what came in my CSA each week, which forced me to learn how the flavors and textured interacted but once I did, I gained freedom to explore and create. Now it’s almost impossible to get a meal wrong.
On top of everything else, having not eaten anything with refined sugar, refined fat, or salt added, these vegetables taste sweeter to me now than fruit used to.
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