Today is the big day of the year for Americans to focus their attention on gratitude… Thanksgiving. Often, families and friends go around the table and say out-loud things for which they have been thankful throughout the year or for which they are thankful at that moment. It’s a little pause. And, it’s always in the pause that something new can bubble up. When we race through our too-busy lives day in and day out the ability to recognize what it is that we are thankful for is difficult as everything blurs together in our haste to “get things done”. Without the pause, being thankful is easy to forget.
So for today – Americans and non-Americans alike – this post poses a little challenge question and exercise: How often do we pause over our food? And what happens if we do?
There are a million jokes about the American Thanksgiving “pig-out”… food is prepared for hours and then the family/friends descend upon the table like hogs-gone-wild and everything is decimated in minutes. We say “I’m full” instead of “I’m satisfied” and then trundle into the living room to watch football all day – that we savor.
But what is food, anyway?
Food ignites our senses – it captivates our eyes, tingles our noses, and wakes up our tongues. Eating is a full-body experience … the original “full-contact” sport. But food has other names. “Food” is bread, vegetables, herbs, water, butter, meat, and so on. And even those are something else. Vegetables are carrots, potatoes, tomatoes. Herbs are rosemary, thyme, sage. Meat is turkey, chicken, and so on. And bread is wheat, water, and yeast. “Food”, then, is the result of the dialogue between us and nature, between us and God. We are given an abundance of raw materials on this planet, and then it is to us to make something of it. We can make something that fully ignites our bodies in a loving response to the gifts, or we can make a glop that stuffs us and keeps the unpleasant feeling of hunger at bay. It is up to us – the possibilities are limitless.
And so it is with all of life. We have available on this planet infinite abundance. It comes as raw materials. It is up to us to make something of it. Do we make a planet that is misbalanced in the distribution of abundance, where some people live in luxury and others starve? Where resources are plundered and diversity is lost? Or do we create solutions that bring people together, restore harmony, connect us with nature? It is very easy to dismiss abstractions like “food”, “forests”, “Afghanistan”. It is much more difficult to dismiss the tomato I took months to grow and then washed and carefully sliced, the tree I sat under when I had difficult days at school as a young girl, and my Afghan friend Aliah I had tea with this week.
Jews have a practice of making a blessing, or prayer, over food before eating it. There is no “one” prayer – the right prayer to say depends on what is being eaten. Bread requires one prayer, vegetables another. Even the amount of bread present requires thought as it prompts different prayers according to quantity – thickly breaded onion rings have a different prayer than thinly coated ones! The point (one point) of the exercise is that of looking… to get us to pause… and to train our focus on the specificity, the individuality, the what it is that we are in relationship with, as well as the point that we are in relationship: bread was wheat, water, and yeast before we put our hands on it. So one could also ask – having eaten of this, being nourished by it, what now will I do with this newfound energy: will I make something good in the world, or will I squander it?
Real gratitude requires relationship and reciprocity.
So here is the exercise: Before you eat, close your eyes and place your hands over your food. See each single ingredient in the food and follow it, one by one, back to its source. For example, if dried oregano was used, see that you follow it all the way back to the living, vibrant oregano plant. Then thank it. Take the time to see each ingredient and follow it to its source and thank it for the gift it has given you. And then, for one moment, ponder what you will do in return with the energy you’re being given with this nourishment. Breathe out and open your eyes.
Does your food taste different when you do this?
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Bonnie
