Food and Nutrition

Indigenous (human & non-human) nourishment exists in 5 categories of equal importance in our lives and in the lives of our ancestors:

Biophilic, Ancestral, Social, Kinetic and Consumable or Edible.

For balanced sustenance as living beings, we must practise and honour these several ways of nourishing ourselves and our clann- family and friends. 

We recognise health and wisdom thrives not simply by eating nourishing food but by re-aligning our relationship with all forms of functional sustenance. 

Biophilic Nutrition – contact and immersion with the natural world ‘An Dúlra’. “Love of Life”. Nourishing our natural ability and gravitation to affiliate and communicate with other living creatures, natural environments and cycles.

Ancestral Nutrition – learning about our genealogical inheritance ‘Na Sinsear’ including the bounties and stresses it has experienced, so as we know what it teaches us.

Social Nutrition – appreciating how communities of people or ‘Tuatha’ sustain each other through supportive contact, communication, recognition and acknowledgment. On an intimate physical level, this means touch and incorporates how love, sex and intimacy contributes to vitality. 

Kinetic Nutrition – celebrates our natural desire to move, act in space and exercise our physical bodies, ‘An Corp’. We move to nourish our musculoskeletal system-our muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones need kinetic nutrition to thrive. Our tissues need physical stress, resistance and movement to feed.

Edible Nutrition – looks at the relationship we hold with digesting food or ‘Bia’. This is both tangible food we eat daily and how we can align ourselves to food’s genetic origin as part of the food-basket of our ancestors. It includes natural healing prescriptions we can use to balance our intake and how food-strengthening is about creating relationship with both scarcity and abundance as part of the natural cycles of seasons. In practical terms, it’s about the nourishment and nutrition that we cook or chew and swallow, that flew, grew or swam that we sow, catch or buy to consume.