I pray before meals.
I was raised a dutiful Protestant in the great, puritanical state of New Hampshire. I went to church, participated in singing and bell choirs, and crushed on the boys in my youth group (ah, Derek!). However, my family was more spiritually oriented than strictly Christian. My dad used to joke, “I’d make a good Jew.” What he meant was that it was important to have a spiritual compass, but the specific instrument didn’t really matter. All good compasses point true north.
In my family, we said grace before meals. Sometimes my dad would say, “Lord, bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and thus to thy service. Amen.” Sometimes it was simply, “Thanks to the critters.”
Although I was raised in the church, it wasn’t until about six years ago that I started saying grace myself in earnest. Not because I identify as Christian, but because I stopped being vegan.
When I was vegan, there was no moral price to pay for eating my food. I had become vegan because of my aversion to animal cruelty, and I felt just fine eating plants and grains. But when I left the vegan fold, I became acutely aware of the cost of my meals. Animals – cute, sentient animals – had died. Before being vegan, I had lived my dietary life in slipshod form of denial. (You know the kind: where you decide that cheeseburgers grow on trees and ignore factory farming.) But now I could not ignore the weight of my decisions. Yes, yes, I would buy the expensive organic meat raised in relatively “humane” conditions. Yes, yes, I would eat meat sparingly. But there was no denying it: death was on my plate.
In my heart, I felt that I owed it to each creature to contemplate their fate. In every meal, I was participating – viscerally – in the life and death cycle. I was responsible for choosing this meal. And through this meal, this animal literally would now become a part of me – of my muscles, of my cells, of my material being.
In our culture, we hide death. But here it was unavoidable. Just like this animal had died, I too, would die and be resolved back to my component parts. The world was a seething and complex cycle of birth and death, creation and destruction. Every item on my plate – including plants – became a study of the ephemerality of life.
But while a part of me cried to sense the bittersweet cycle of life and death, I could also feel the poignant beauty of my interdependence with the fabric of the great wide world. Every morsel of food was a reminder of my connection to the world: my carrot could be traced back to the grocery store, then to the staff and workers who transported it, then to the machines (and humans) who harvested it, to the soil of earth, to the light of the sun. There had been so many hands involved in bringing this one little carrot to my plate.
Eating had become a spiritual practice.
The web of interconnection necessary to produce a single plate of food is almost incomprehensible. Saying grace before meals reminds me to re-member my connection to the whole. To be awed by Nature’s generosity and incredible diversity. To appreciate the effort, toil, and sacrifice that has brought this meal into being. To touch the bittersweet longing of my aliveness and mortality.
I may return to veganism, but I will never lose the gratitude and awe that I have now discovered in eating my food. So, to the critters, and the veggies, and the world, I say a heartfelt, “Amen.”
