Would you consider the phrase “Food for thought”–ahem—outdated? It was perhaps engineered in an era when there was plenty of time to eat and chew the food till it was liquid enough to swallow. So they defined the art of leisurely and prolonged thinking in terms of masticating food. Perhaps there were many people who were more active thinkers than eaters and therefore thought was food to them?
We, belong to a generation (with plenty of overweights), where eating means just tasting and swallowing or cramming into the mouth and swallowing while we rush to keep an appointment or race back to our work place. Leisurely eating is an impossible luxury that we can indulge in once in a while or not at all. So, when there is no leisure for food, where is the time for thought? Since we do not chew our food to liquidity and think through things till clarity emerges, the phrase should be rubbed out of existence?
Perhaps, this is the reason why we do not have “room for thought” too? We are so rushed for time that we act before we think. One of the recent Indian blockbusters has the hero demonstrate this trend in a classroom. He, with due deligence, opens a heavy tome and seemingly copies some words on to the board. All nonsense of course! He urges the class to find the meaning of the words in thirty seconds and says the clock ticks now. Not a single soul pauses to think. They drag out their copies of the text and begin frantically searching for the word in the glossory and the body of the text book to no avail till the time ticks out and the hero proves his point. Isn’t that how we behave in real life too?
Therefore, it is not surprising that terms like “thinking out of the box” or “within the box” are popular phrases of today. Those who think out of the box are valued and highly marketable people who are expected to chew the cud and create the “thoughts” that others can cram and swallow “without a thought”. “Thinking within the box” is also encouraged as it helps focus attention on what we are doing rather than on what we should be doing.
Well, having said all this, it is time to pause and let you chew on the cud and recall the phrase “food for thought” from the –ahem–depths of obscurity it is fast descending into.
