Eating with the hands

I think the thing I wanted most about coming to this side of the world - Morocco- was the social permission to eat with your hands! I have always greatly enjoyed the connection between my hands and food. As I told you before, I spent a lot of time with my grandmothers when I was a child , and most of the time they were cooking, so I was cooking with them. Neither of this beautiful wise woman ever used a recipe and practically never, the food tasted bad and was in excess of something... I understood through imitation and feeling that the key was in PERCEIVING THE FOOD. They, like I do , very rarely used instruments such as spoons, forks or even heat potholders! (extreme alert).

The thing is... the hands are the connection with the heart, the hands are our first thermometer that detects temperature, they also regulate the temperature of our body, the hands are responsible for the inexplicable magic of thousands of hundreds of ancestral methods of healing. So, whenever we touch something with our hands and we are present in the act, we are really able to not only receive the energy (which is the global way of mentioning information) but we are also able to send ours and in this way we create a bond between us. and what we are touching! Eating with your hand has another wonderful peculiarity which is that, basically, you have to be committed to the task, literally, because you can burn yourself, the liquid can slip ... for example when I ate Couscous in Morocco they formed small balls of couscous and passed it around. from one hand to the other until it cools. Eating with your hand brings a miracle for our times: putting aside the cell phone!

Nowadays there are many countries in wich the tradition of eating with the hand is a common thing ..countries like Morocco, Ethiopia, Thailand, India and Malaysia keep doing it along the territory and above all with typical dishes; allso we could say that in Mexico we also eat with our hands: tacos, gorditas and sopes, for example….

Another practical example could be the parenting “method” known as bwl – baby lead weaning – which proposes, among other things, offering the child the most “wild” or least processed pieces of food possible so that the child can touch them, perceive them. and discover all the qualities of the food before putting it in your mouth: it basically says yes to playing with your food! (That's what we all wanted to do and did a little bit when we were children, but as soon as they saw us they scolded us for it).

I celebrate eating with my hand and I invite you to do it, I invite you to play with food, to discover how it feels in weight, in temperature, in size, the portion of food that you are going to eat... try it with simple things like a piece of fruit, that piece of bread, that portion of legumes and… you make the trip fun!