For almost as many months as make a year, I’ve been working in a wine shop. From an outsider’s view, its a big leap from running an IT company. But for me it has felt easy, natural. I wanted my work to be more aligned with my passions, escape the soul crushing corporate world and take some time to decompress and work out how to take my life in another direction. I wanted to give up using the ‘w’ word. Enjoy going to work.

I love talking with people, meeting them, seeing the sparkle in their eyes when they talk about who and what they love. I am lucky that in my work now I get to see that sparkle every day. Customers celebrating with family and friends, choosing wine to share with their lover, their mates, their colleagues. Conversations that spark and fly off in many directions with passionate winemakers. Tales of the pursuit and discovery of beauty. The problems I solve for customers may seem meaningless, but they can make for a moment of reflection and joy in someone’s day. It is a pleasurable thing, to be able to do that for someone. Customers, particularly regulars are quick to share their gratitude when our recommendations have this result.

A little while ago, I got to talk with Enise and help her choose wine. At first we didn’t remember one another, and she asked for help to find the sauvignon blanc. That’s what threw me. She wanted Marlborough sauvignon blanc for her granddaughter, Sancerre, Pouilly Fume for herself and once we recognised one another she also decided to get the old and the new Adelaide Hills classics, Shaw and Smith and Marko’s Vineyard (made by another member of the Hill Smith family and to my tastes, just like Shaw and Smith Sauvignon Blanc tasted in the mid 90′s) after I suggested she might enjoy comparing them. We had a great chat about fashions in wine, food, aesthetics as she piled sauvignon blanc of every style into my arms.

Enise has been living in Abu Dhabi but is making her home in Brisbane again. She’s an interesting lady who has worked in politics and more recently in humanitarian aid organisations. Her husband, a nuclear physicist for whom her adoration overflows, is continuing to work overseas while she directs work on their new home. She always buys him a bottle of whisky, something rare and interesting, though its some months yet until he joins here here. But Enise wants to ensure that when he’s back she has plenty of the things he likes so they can enjoy them together.

I feel privileged that from our brief interactions in the service of choosing wine, Enise has shared so much of her life and her effusive personality.

As we chatted, the lights caught Enise’s beautiful carved silver pendant, a square framing flowing Arabic script. A proverb from the Koran she told me. About beauty and trusting your heart. I wish I’d written down the words, but in that moment their beauty moved me. With a lump in my throat I told her so, and she responded, her eyes intensely on mine, illustrating the riches of Arabic culture through stories of her encounters in the region. I agreed and said how disappointing it was to see many Australian judge Arabic and people of other Middle Eastern cultures on the actions of a minority. My colleagues joined our conversation at this point as Enise’s granddaughter listened on. The conversation turned then to the treatment of refugees by our own government and the shame of detentions centres, as we expressed our disappointment and despair at the human cost of populist policy, the enormous contribution of migrants and refugees to Australia’s development as a nation and the need for action and vocal opposition. The need to find a better way and what shape that might take. How to make the leap from the way things are today, the need to start a national conversation. How to make a change we all strongly agreed is needed.

This conversation was unusual in context – from a conversation about wine – a shared passion – to a conversation of shared resolve, a sparkle in our eyes of a different kind and a fire in our bellies for change. To see our nation treat our brothers and sisters from coming across the seas with with dignity. To welcome them.

Some of us eat for sustenance while others eat for pleasure. It’s safe to assume that those who see food as mere ballast to fill a hole are unlikely to read this blog.

‘Emotional eating’ is a term used in connection with obesity in a certain sort of women’s magazine, usually in articles up the back near the horoscopes. I’ve always found it a strange term, for a number of reasons.

So far as mainstream media is concerned, it would seem that only women suffer from this condition. There are thousands of articles on the internet for women who want to break free of a cycle of weight gain caused by their compulsion to eat to relieve stress or alleviate boredom and disaffection. Male obesity is a different matter altogether, with weight gain usually framed as having occurred ‘due an increasingly sedentary lifestyle’. In tune with our expectations about gender roles, the Journal of Applied Psychology found that women in a large study who were 11 kg below average weight took home an additional (US) $15,572 while men who were 11 kg below average weight earned less than their colleagues. The researchers commented:

“Perhaps the most startling finding of this investigation is that men and women experience opposite incentives regarding weight in the very thin to average weight range. Whereas women are punished for any weight gain, very thin women receive the most severe punishment for their first few pounds of weight gain. This finding is consistent with research showing that the media’s consistent depiction of an unrealistically thin female ideal leads people to see this ideal as normative, expected, and central to female attractiveness.”

Emotional eating is a problematic term on another level, as it conveys the idea that ‘emotions’ can only be negative and unattractive. That we would only eat prodigiously when things are bad. That emotion is valid as a pejorative term. Yet the spectrum of human emotion covers from deepest black to the brightest hues of happiness. And food can provoke or match a wide range of emotions too.

Think: when do we choose to eat good food and wine? For many people, they celebrate special occasions with food, a decent steak or a roast at home with a special bottle of wine and warm company, or a meal at a restaurant, where a team of chefs take the best produce and their professional techniques to present several courses of the finest food for our enjoyment. Such an occasion is one of happiness and pleasure that is recalled fondly at a later date. Photos are taken, mementos tucked away so that we can prolong the enjoyment and recount the highlights to our friends. A whole industry is built on this that now extends to television shows, books, blogs, licensing deals and merchandising rights. Photosharing sites like Instagram and Pinterest are vehicles to parade our gustatory conquests  to others and record our good taste in food and wine for posterity. Our desire to extend the enjoyment of good eating seems boundless. These occasions are emotional and eating is central to them.

Even at a base level of choosing our food, emotions are involved. All of us have likes and dislikes, favourite foods and others we reject or avoid due to how they taste or their texture – these foods provoke feelings or emotions and are often tied to our memories of some other time when we experienced the same food. Have you ever found yourself  thinking about that amazing holiday you had by the sea years ago while your eating dinner or thinking about hanging out with your Granny as a kid as you catch the scent of your neighbour’s rose garden? Or of the dive-y sharehouse you lived in on the cusp of adulthood after you’ve just discovered a rotten onion or potato in your kitchen? Our olfactory memory is strong, smells and by extension food and flavours can bring all sorts of thoughts and feelings about the past sharply into our consciousness.

How food makes you feel is central to the act of eating. Eating is by its nature emotional, even if that feeling is simply the contentment of being able to fill your belly.

So, dear reader (I know there are at least three of you), tell me about your emotional eating experiences.