Over the last five months I have been looking at ways of integrating magical perspectives into day to day existence.

Historically it has been too easy for me to drift away and get very insular with magical studies that end up having minimal impact on my life (excluding spell effects).

Food is the current focus of this integration because it’s something you have to think about every day, tells the story of the seasons and making little changes to how you eat tends to produce big effects. In short, it’s ripe for occult meddling.

Besides, the difference between home cooking with intent and herbal spell casting is one of degree rather than category.

So this is why I paid extra special attention this morning to this great article about the rules of food as I flipped through a paper I usually never read (even though I used to work for the same holding company) while waiting to go into a client meeting in Bloomsbury. Not that I read physical newspapers anymore, of course. What am I, a blacksmith?

Simply put; nobody really knows what you should and shouldn’t eat. All we can get is guidelines and possible best practices. Definitely read the article.

Food Rules

• Eat only foods that will eventually rot.
• Eat only foods made from ingredients you can picture in their raw state in nature.
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.
• Treat meat as a flavouring or special occasion food.
• Eat your colours.
• Sweeten and salt your food yourself.
• “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’ll be dead”.
• Have a glass of wine with dinner.
• Stop eating before you are full.
• Do all your eating at a table. (A desk is not a table.)

The following few rules reminded me of Jason’s post about McDonald’s salads and the comments it sparked. Something that really struck me is that American farmers markets seem to be mostly more expensive than supermarkets. This is news to me. Personally upsetting news because in Europe they are cheaper by at least a third. Unless you shop at Borough Market like I do. But that’s just for fun.

• Get out of the supermarket whenever you can.
• Eat only foods that have been cooked by humans. (Not factory robots.)
• Eat animals that have themselves eaten well.

So you can see that three of these rules can be replaced with one handy piece of advice: “Don’t be poor.” It’s a troubling but unavoidable reality. Of course, this has always historically been the case.

Clearly the modern solution involves re-learning how to grow vegetables in your home/property, government policy and voting with our weekly shopping budget. Because it is truly absurd that the most vulnerable citizens in any First World economy can only afford meals with the nutritional value of a pack of cigarettes.

At the risk of getting too serious, it was actually the final rule that made me think there was probably a blog post in this:

• Break the rules once in a while.

Life is too short to live on organic oatmeal and home grown spinach leaves. Break some rules tonight; raise a glass and commit to following at least some of these food rules from first thing tomorrow.

And don’t forget to floss afterward. Forgetting to floss can kill you.

Sláinte.