Food and Transformation:

Imagery and Symbolism of Eating

Eve Jackson

1996: Inner City Books, Toronto.

From Volume 22, #2, November 1997, 128 pp.

In her introduction, Eve Jackson presents her orientation in the book. Her abiding concern is to keep constantly in mind the interplay of conscious and unconscious, physical and psychic, literal and metaphorical aspects of food and eating. Above all, she wants to listen to what the psyche has to say through the media of dreams of clients, myths, customs, and images incorporated in language. In my opinion, Jackson has fulfilled her goal admirably in her multifaceted approach.

One important line of discussion I found particularly intriguing was to link historically humanity’s eating habits and attitudes to the evolution of collective consciousness. In the first chapter, “The Food Chain,” Jackson discusses the uroboric reality of all of nature — eat and/or be eaten and the dangers for individuals of both sexes to be poisoned or devoured by the negative mother and father complexes. Avoiding this assimilation requires well-developed powers of discrimination, in what to accept or reject as good nourishment, and food sacrifices of propitiation may often be required by the deities to ward off the swallowing of human life and consciousness.

In Chapter 2, “On the Menu,” Jackson goes back to the gathering and hunting stages of human existence, interpreting the myths of a primordial paradise as reflecting our unconscious unity with the One, with no split between nature and culture. But upon leaving the garden of the forest for the open plain, humanity embarked on the hunting era. Jackson correlates the development of the new skills needed to outwit and kill large animals with increased brain size and intelligence and the ascendancy of the male principle. To hunt or go to war requires the self-reliant qualities of a man who has emancipated himself from mother, and has become a provider and defender. Jackson connects the division and distribution of the dead prey by the man deemed to have killed it with the Jungian process of differentiation.

In the next main stage of evolution, agriculture, there are very many myths involving the death of a divine being from whose remains the plants grow. This is analogous to the breaking apart of animal carcasses of sacrificial animals and both reflect the psychological process by which our original unconscious wholeness is rent asunder as distinctions appear, requiring reintegration at a higher level. Feminine consciousness, characterized by the delicate and painstaking discrimination needed to breed a variety of plants and to process and cook the produce, flourished in the agricultural period.

Jackson explores the developmental and social ramifications of eating together in Chapter 3. Sharing food together is an act of social commitment involving self-restraint and is a fundamental bonding ritual for family, group, and community members and can include dead ancestors as well. To eat the food of another culture is a step towards assimilation or can indicate greater flexibility and freer social exchange.

Chapter 4 is especially rich and far-reaching. It analyzes the whole process of assimilation — ingestion, digestion, and excretion — in its physical, psychological, alchemical, metaphorical, and cultural aspects.

The book concludes with a brief chapter dealing with cultural and psychological meanings attached to fatness, thinness, body image, and self-image, particularly as these issues apply to women. Marion Woodman’s books come to mind in this context.

While reading the book, I had a dream involving a small figurine of Venus of Willendorf made out of strawberries. A few days later I constructed a facsimile of this artifact and ate it in ritualistic fashion. Jackson’s book has served as a most helpful catalyst in my own psychological process, along with other factors, during the last few weeks, leading to revolutionary changes in my own eating habits and attitudes.

—Valerie Broege