Everyone eats. Everyone likes to eat to some degree. What we like to eat is largely dictated by geography, biology, and economy. But given enough choices, we tend to prefer certain things over others. Well, some do. There are some people who don’t like to eat. They don’t have an eating disorder, unless food apathy is a disorder. There are people who aren’t starving and aren’t forced to have a strange relationship with food who have one nonetheless. Then, there are people who have a love affair with food.

Astrology can show how much a person may be into food as a pursuit or passion. It can also show what types of food a person may like to eat, how likely they are to overeat, and what could happen. There is no one factor involved. The moon, the sun, the 6th house, the planets in the 6th house, and the nature of the ruler of the 6th house all give us a clue.

But so does the 8th house, strangely enough. And the 4th house. And the ascendant. And Jupiter, and Venus.

Astrology can also show how a person’s tastes can change over time. It can also show what their ideal diet is based on how they are hard-wired.

We eat with our mouths, but we also eat with our skin, noses, eyes, and ears, to some extent. What we like is in our brains. Some people are naturally more attune to the experience of eating food, because it is a sensuous experience and they are sensuous people. Some are not. Still, even people who aren’t attune to food may eat for other reasons.

What we ate as a kid and how it shaped our relationship to food, I: The sign of the 4th House

Was your mother a good cook? Mine wasn’t. Neither was her mother. Neither of them wanted to cook food. Neither of them particularly liked food. My experience of my mother’s cooking was usually that there was maybe one good part, and the rest was iffy, raw or burned, and that anything complicated was too much of a mess. I hadn’t had a casserole until I was in my early teens eating at someone else’s house. Anything that required a lot of ingredients, chopping, or minding of the oven or stove wasn’t happening in her kitchen.

My mother made what my father liked to eat, which was bachelor food. We ate a lot of sandwiches for dinner. Hamburgers, hotdogs, tacos, burritos, Reubens, grilled cheese, tuna melts, steak sandwiches, sausage sandwiches, egg and bacon sandwiches. My parents didn’t like vegetables, so we didn’t have many of those. The goal was to get done as much as possible to get excused from the crowded table and try not to do anything that will get you slapped.

I have  Gemini on the cusp of my 4th house. Gemini food is eaten with the hands, perhaps to be eaten on the go, meant to be over and done with. However, I grew up to be a person who likes to cook. It’s something I do with my hands, but the possibilities are seemingly endless.

Aries:

Taurus: These people love being cooked for. Chances are that their mothers were wonderful cooks whom they never learned from. They were well-fed as children with wholesome, nourishing food. Surprisingly, they’re more clingy to mother’s or grandmother’s cooking than Cancers are. They’ll eat what

Gemini: People with Gemini on the cusp of the 4th house tend to either go for finger- or handheld foods, or foods that require a lot of handling, like pomegranates or shellfish. They would prefer to eat with their hands rather than utensils. They may have a penchant for street foods. They will try anything. They may become all-purpose cooks and bakers at home. When they were growing up, food was functional, often quick and simple.

Cancer:

Leo:

Virgo:

Libra:

Scorpio:

Sagittarius:

Capricorn: People with Capricorn on the cusp of the 4th house don’t like to get their hands dirty with the ugly business of cooking. This person wouldn’t be caught dead rolling raw meat into balls, but probably has a lot of fancy kitchen equipment to make pretty-looking cookies that look better than they taste. This person probably either grew up competing for enough food or not being allowed to eat as much as they would like; someone probably warned them not to make a pig of themselves when eating in public.

Aquarius:

Pisces:

What we ate as a kid and how it shaped our relationship to food, II: The sign of the Moon

When I lived in Korea, I tried to go out and try new things. Granted, it was all new to me, even if it shouldn’t have been. Sometimes, you just want what you know, and when you’re homesick, you want food from home. A Big Mac tastes the same anywhere, but when you order something off a menu that looks like your traditional food, you assume it is. More than a few times when we were having a version of a traditional American or Western food, someone would ask me “Is it just like Grandma used to make?” Just imagine for a moment that you’re in a pub and you order a dish that comes with mashed potatoes, without butter or milk or salt, but plenty of onions and a small green plant you think could be a raw soybean and a white crunchy substance you know is raw garlic. Then, someone asks you in a thick Korean accent, “Is it just like Grandma used to make?” My go-to answer was always “No — my grandma was a terrible cook!” Of course,  I didn’t follow it up with the rest of my thought, which was “But even if she hated me, she wouldn’t have done this to me.”

It was disappointing to me to not get the traditional thing I wanted. I was surprised to find out that they put corn in pizza there. I was even more surprised to find out that the reason they did it was because they