Mind-body and the oddity of cravings

Morocco is great for a number of reasons: the fact that one can survive fairly comfortably on about ten dollars a day certainly being high up on that list for an aimless college drop out who just plunked her remaining savings on a 1k+ ticket to North Africa. Of course, this refers to a pretty basic level of survival; it includes a cold shower on a rooftop every few weeks, squat toilets, and rooms with beds and occasionally an electrical outlet. I don't camp much, so this is my version of roughing it and honestly it's generally rougher than your average tent and campfire jaunt to the woods.

The food in Morocco is excellent and I highly recommend it. However, with a few notable exceptions, I can't say I had a chance to indulge. One could reasonably say my travelling companion and I were starving while there. Most days included a some bread and bananas (the best bananas I've ever had, mind you), maybe a jus de some-sort-of-fruit-or-nut (I'll get back to these), and a dinner of legumes with maybe some cous-cous in the fancier joints. Beet salad and frites were the prevalent "vegetarian" options, although the frites were clearly soaked in animal fats and usually didn't end well for me. Occasionally we blew some of our hotel money on a bag of pastries - napoleons are both extraordinarily cheap and extremely delicious there. In Casablanca, we went through a mediocre pizza and lethal doses of hot sauce phase. And of course there were the ever-exciting trips to the Hypermarche to purchase durham candies, teaching us rather decisively that the U.S. has cornered the market on junk food and other countries will never come close to our abilities to manufacture nutritionally meaningless digestive pablum.

The lingering malnutrition combined with a high amount of daily exertion. It was cold there; believe it or not, Morocco has damp winters through most of the North and I spent much of my time there an interesting shade of underdressed blueish lilac. We also walked a lot to find ruins or caves or hills, because even if you have a good supply of english books acquired at the foreign language store, there are soooo many hours in a day to fill when you aren't working or socializing. These added an urgency to eating that otherwise might have been blunted.

There's a certain enjoyable aspect to this - food never tastes so good as right at that moment when your taste buds are at a tipping point between ordinary use and desuetude. A simple slice of white bread takes on subtle dimensions unimaginable to a well-fed person; place any flavor on it and every sector of your tongue will dance, feeding the brain with so much information - sour, sweet, salty, umami... the blood set a-coursing and the mind waxes giddy even as it regains its ability to focus.

My food cravings also took on a remarkable substance. More than cravings, they were full on fantasies. They say the average male thinks of sex however many remarkably frequent moments a day and this was about as often as I thought of food. As the weeks went on, our conversations increasingly turned to "what we were going to eat when we got back to the states."

My personal fixation was dairy. Usually this would manifest in fantasies of buckets of ice cream. I wanted to immerse myself in one. It also inspired a proactive approach towards acquiring anything remotely associated with milk. As such, the jus de whatevers were usually the highlight of my day. Ordinarily "jus" isn't so much juice as smoothie. Other than apple and orance juices, the average "jus" beverages tended to be a whole lot of cream blended with some milk, a lot of sugar and something else. The two most common flavors were avacat and amande, both of which inspired religious devotion in me, even if these were out of my daily price range and more for special occasions. I still long for a frothy jus d'avocat on warm days, although I suspect I wouldn't find it quite so immaculately satisfying nowadays. My time in Morocco was also the only time I have ever taken cream in my coffee.

When I got back to the state, I spent about a month indulging my ice cream fantasies, although regrettably only from pint containers instead of immersable buckets. And eventually, things levelled out, my diet went back to normal and my dairy intake levelled off. I'm no vegan, but my natural habits usually don't draw me towards dairy products other than the occasional yogurt or a glass of milk with dinner. Yet to this day, I find myself overcome with dairy cravings from time to time. And I do mean overcome, with nearly the same urgency I used to feel back in Morocco.

Cravings and the myriad implications of mind-body connections they raise fascinate me. There are a million theoretical reasons to crave milk. It could be a craving for amino acids, maybe tryptophan because I'm stressed (although I'm not really comparitively so); possibly a need for calcium or vitamin D (although really I do take calcium supplements already). It could be emotional. It could be hormonal. But any way you pour it, that interaction between the mind and body is at play in awe inspiring ways.

The idea that the body is sophisticated - or fine tuned - enough to produce cravings for exactly the nutrients it needs (via some food rich in such nutrients) intrigues me. There's a lot of controversy over whether these cravings are actually responses to nutritional deficiencies or a combination of homronal and emotional impulses. Sure, chocolate cravings probably aren't actually indicative of low magnesium levels, but there still seems to be something to this idea. For instance, I often crave peanutbutter, something rich in B vitamins and fat, neither of which I get a lot of in my diet otherwise. In some regards, it makes a great deal of sense. Evolution would and has certainly favored those with the preferences that lead them to seek certain life-sustaining habits and indulgences. Our nutritional needs have adapted to our environments. That our tastes should do the same makes sense on a very grand scale. But within an individual's lifetime, to sense an imbalance and provide the brain with an impulse based on taste is quite a neat and tidy proposition.

On the other end, there are emotional cravings, which are hugely fascinating to me. I frequently find that what I crave emotionally is absolutely counter to what actually tastes good once I've started to eat it. There's a magic about pastries, cakes, and fanciful confections. They tell of birthday parties long forgotten, they feature prominently in children's movies as eidetic manifestations of "the perfect food", and they smell so good. Doughnuts, for instance, take on a very personal attachment: First, when I was a child, we'd go to a local dougnut shop ever Sunday, buy a box of doughnuts and eat them together with a chocolate milk. Later, when I worked at the salsa factory, we'd occasionally have days where doughnuts and coffee would appear in the snack room and the quotidian operations shut down as everyone ran to stake out a maple bar or two... those moments in the break room were very special occasions, and some of the first times I really felt a sense of community in any extra-familial area of my life. So, I still crave doughnuts, even though I can't stand the taste of them - the fried bread tastes greasy and the frosting is so sweet it forces my mouth into the antithesis of a pucker. There are also other sensory implications at play. I love the look of desserts. And I'd just as soon smell a brownie or a cookie than eat it, but sniffing other people's cookies (that sounds like a euphemism doesn't it) is generally frowned upon as poor etiquette

And of course, there are hormonal cravings - maybe one of the joys of being a woman is being reminded on a monthly basis how a tiny change in body chemistry alters one's entire perception. The perception that milk is absolutely delicious being a fairly minor example. Of course I'm thinking of pms/pregnancy/the pill and its various mood altering effects, but the same applies to all sorts of activities, supplements and medications that we take. I once took a supplement for a few weeks that had a side effect of boosting testosterone and I can attest to some substantial mood altering effects on that one - note to teenage boys, I'm very sorry for you. I could verge off here into topics of love, gambling, exercise and self-medication via "nutrition", but I'll refrain for now. Suffice to say, it can be a little unnerving to realize just how delicate our perceptions and personalities are and how easily influenced they can be. It makes me feel skeptical about identity and other concepts that point to any absolute or concrete sense of self. I've thought sometimes that we are simply multitudes passing ourselves off as a coherrent entities through a veneer of habits, rituals and social faces. What exactly makes me "me" and what is just a stray bit of estrogen passing through my system... I suppose it's the sort of thing that inspires religion.

Maybe what I find most fascinating is the way these three variables interact - hormonal fluctuations alter emotional states and nutritional deficiencies affect hormones/neurotransmitters, and the equation works in all directions to the point where there is no clear chicken and egg, but instead a mish-mash of varying forces all pushing and pulling at once.

But at any rate, I suppose there are worse things than downing an extra glass of milk this evening.