The Original Sin
In today’s world, grabbing and eating a cookie out of a jar or a pantry against the parents’ directives would be considered “cute” and “funny” or at most only mildly inappropriate. No child should be kicked out of the house for doing it or severely punished for it. It would be abuse or neglect. Unless the child has diabetes or some other medical condition and eating the forbidden cookies turns into a secret habit — then it might be a more serious matter that should be addressed for the sake of safety for the child.
In the Bible, it is interesting to note that Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden for eating a fruit from a tree that they were told not to eat from. Listening to some bad advice and then eating one fruit. Taking a bite and giving it to your friend, too. That was it. Was eating a fruit that they weren’t supposed to eat really “that bad”? What was really the problem at the core?
It seems interesting to me that eating something — the act of ingesting something from outside and taking it into our bodies and making it become a part of who we are — gives us a very different experience and consequence than any other act that we do. It is the most intimate way we relate to the world around us. Eating one dose of a strong poison can definitely kill us. But we eat different things everyday almost mindlessly without fear. And great pleasure comes from eating foods and we generally understand the dangers of eating too much of the most enjoyable foods. But no one really tells adults how many cookies they can eat.
From a biological perspective, eating and digesting is the most complex activity a living organism engages in. What is eaten literally changes the gene expression of hundreds or thousands of genes at the cellular level, interacting with the microbiome of the organism. Depending on what has been ingested, the makeup of the microbiome community shifts in multiple directions. The immune system is also engaged in this process as well because harmful bacteria and viruses come inside together with food that needs to be digested. It is a dynamic interplay between what was outside and what lives inside that affects our mood, our joints, our brains, our gut and our minds.
So what’s the moral of the story? Maybe think one more time before peeling back the plastic wrapper of that shelf-stable cookie with who-knows-what’s-inside? Or maybe think again when you even look at them at the store before putting it into your cart…?
