Why I eat

I eat because food is alive. Think about it for a moment. Maybe we modern humans have so many diet-related health problems not because we eat too much salt or sugar or cholesterol... Maybe it's because our food is dead. Every last bit of anything recognizable as having once been a living breathing organism is beaten out of it & shrink-wrapped. How can we survive on that?

It used to be when I went to the grocery store for apples I'd look for the biggest shiniest most perfect-looking apple I could find. Bigger is better, right? I'm American, of course it is! But then I started thinking, and remembering back to when I was a kid. What does an apple really look like, when it's left alone to do its apple-thing and grow in its own apple-way? It's never round and red all over -- it's usually smallish and kind of lopsided with an odd spot here or there.

What makes an apple interesting to me now is the same thing that makes a person interesting: It's absolutely unique. And this, I think, is what's gone wrong. Food has become just another mass-produced assembly-line commodity. We don't care anymore about its character or substance or the craft that went into it. We don't think about where our food comes from. We don't want to think about where our food comes from.

Twenty years ago, I was on a trip to Israel & spent a day in the markets of Jerusalem, the Old City. I took a wrong turn & ended up at the butcher's stalls. I looked up & all of a sudden there were carcasses & heads of all manner of beasts hanging, dangling right in front of me. I looked down & there was a gulley down the middle of the street where the blood could drain. Now, I totally understand where vegetarians are coming from; this is kind of gross and you can make a good argument that it's cruel. But if you are going to eat meat -- and I do -- you have a responsibility to know what it was and that it didn't start off all sterile & shrink-wrapped. This was once a living, breathing, feeling creature & when it's stripped of its skin it sure looks a lot like us. Whether you eat meat or not, you have a responsibility to know the food on your plate and what it looked like before it got there and what it took to get it there.

When I eat with this level of mindfulness, I'm aware that what's on my plate is nothing short of a miracle.