What''s Life without Eating?

My cousin and her boyfriend were recently over for a dinner. She's getting a Ph.D. in Chinese medicine and always entertains us with stories about her program. She told us about a woman in the Bay Area who has such strong chi that she supposedly doesn't eat. She only sucks on one seed a day and drinks one cup of tea. In Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda, there's also a story about a woman who learned how to live without eating. Okay, so it sounds totally crazy. And I'm pretty open-minded to crazy.

What did ensue, however, was a lively discussion about what the world would be like if food wasn't necessary. What if we were all able to live from absorbing the energy that surrounds us. What changes would ensue? In the short term? In the long term?

I've been thinking about this and since my world is based on food and eating, and personally, I think that the world would fall apart. So much of our culture (and by "our" I mean most of the world's known cultures) is based on food and eating, the world as we know it would disappear and instead of visions of enlightened beings, I envision dried up, vapid, annoying people without any lust for life.

Not only do we spend an immense amount of time growing and producing food, a good part of our daily lives are spent buying, preparing and storing food. Billions of people are employed in food production. And culturally, food is a way of giving, of loving and often the center of family rituals. Politically, nations rise and fall from their ability to feed their own people, of their ability to sell their goods. What would be the same?

There is an argument to say for free time. Think of how much free time we'd have to do other things if we didn't have to eat. How much less time would we spend on worrying about eating too much, eating things that will eventually kill us, or even eating too little?

Would China be even more aggressive if it wouldn't have to worry about feeling more than a billion people? Would countries that are immobilized by famine actually be able to spend time building infrastructure that would enable them to become m ore active members of geopolitics?

I suppose I'd have a lot more time on my hands since I would be unemployed.

In the end though, all I can think about is how terrible the world would be without pizza, dim sum, fresh baked cookies, or coffee ice cream. I like sharing amazing meals with friends. I like cooking for the people I love. I love to eat the food that the amazingly talented chef boyfriend cooks for me. Personally, if I were choosing a super power, the last one I'd go with would be absorbing energy from the freaking universe so that I wouldn't have to eat.