Food. Our energy source. Essential for life.
You may have experienced hunger, not necessarily long-term food insecurity, but you may have experienced hunger in your day to day life. The gnawing pangs, a headache, a shaky feeling, perhaps, the inability to concentrate, to move efficiently, fatigue of mind and body. Imagine if this were your daily condition, being chronically underfed, undernourished, worrying, wondering where you were going to get your next meal. For 1 in 6 Americans, and nearly 1 in 4 children, this is their daily experience.
But food is not only fuel. It also connects us to community and to the earth. In our contemporary era, with the ever-quickening pace of life, the alienation of modernity, the soul-squeezing demands of trying to just keep it all together in our daily lives as the global elites organize the world to benefit their bottom lines, we are losing this connection. Even those Americans who are not experiencing food insecurity may not be being nourished by their food. I am not only referring to being undernourished by the material "quality" of fast food, junk food, processed food, but also to our impoverished experiences of eating a meal. How many of us eat on the run, barely tasting the food, or alone, not sharing the pleasure of a meal? How many of us eat in the company of the television, even if at the family table?
My grandmother, my lola (the term some Filipinos use for grandmother) taught me a lot about food. She was always cooking and sharing food. Born in the Ilocos Norte province of the Philippines in 1902, her family were rice farmers. I listened with fascination as she explained to me about the fields, the process of planting and harvesting and drying the rice. I asked her about this over and over again, never tiring of hearing her reminiscences of the rice paddies.
Lola, even after she came to the U.S. in 1976, ate a diet mostly consisting of rice, fish, and vegetables. She lived to be 101, healthy and on her own. (Fantastic woman, she became a citizen in 1991, in order to register as a Democrat and vote for Bill Clinton!) Watching her relationship with food, whether from her garden or from the grocer, I observed the simple grace of slowing down, appreciating the bounty, preparing it with love and gratitude, and ultimately sharing it, with family, friends, neighbors. She was a simple cook, not a gourmet one, but nourished by her food and her wisdom, I understood the interconnected nature of all things.
The poet Mary Oliver writes of this interbeing, calling us away from the table back to the source of the bounty, our earth:
Rice
It grew in the black mud.
It grew under the tiger's orange paws.
Its stems thicker than candles, and as straight.
Its leaves like the feathers of egrets, but green.
The grains cresting, wanting to burst.
Oh, blood of the tiger.
I don't want you to just sit at the table.
I don't want you just to eat, and be content.
I want you to walk into the fields
Where the water is shining, and the rice has risen.
I want you to stand there, far from the white tablecloth.
I want you to fill your hands with mud, like a blessing.
Lola was always giving food to people. She gave out fruits as gifts. Some people may have found this quirky, gifting the postal carrier, the friendly bank teller, the PacBell repair man, with an orange or a mango. But because of her warm smile and big heart, her largeness of spirit, even in a 4'10" body, I think the fruit was often received with genuine warmth and love.
I watched her prepare the animal proteins she would eat, with care, near reverence. While she prepared her food, she was often talking to herself in Ilocano (a language I do not understand, but the gentle clucking sound of which still fills my heart with love and longing), and I imagined her talking to the chicken, the shrimp, the ox (she loved oxtail soup!) and most importantly, the fish. The gratitude that she had for the food, the respect she gave the ingredients, were a sign of the respect, the understanding she had for the great web of life.
Mary Oliver suggests that the sacred act of killing a living being and eating it, can reconnect us to the great gift and mystery of life itself, life falling back into death, rising again into life and down again:
The Fish
The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.
Eating food is not just for bodily hunger but can connect us with all that is, with spirit, or community, if you prefer, if the word spirit hits your ear in an off key.
Buddhist monks, before eating a meal, may give gratitudes to all that contributed to it, the cook, the farmer, the soil, the rain, sky, sun, moon, the whole chain of being, such that we see that in every grain of rice is the whole universe.
Hunger is the deprivation not only of calories but of community. The feelings of despair and self-hatred that hunger may bring, with families struggling to feed children, may bring isolation and a feeling of disconnection.
We can help the hungry in America by giving time and/or money to Feeding America, a marvelous organization that efficiently uses 98 cents of every dollar to feed people. Just $1 provides seven meals, and until the end of September, each dollar given to Feeding America will be matched by a corporate donor.
I also hope that we can remember the possibly not physically hungry, but the lonely, and perhaps share a meal with someone, whether this means inviting over a neighbor, visiting an elderly friend or neighbor with some cake and coffee, or maybe just inviting that co-worker who always eats alone at her desk to share lunchtime.
Perhaps, in the true spirit of feeding America and nourishment, we can also slow down when we prepare food and/or when we eat, even if it is fast food, take a moment to be grateful and reconnect, eat mindfully. Taste the honey of life as we take in the fuel for life.
Mary Oliver beautifully evokes for us the sweetness of this interbeing:
Honey at the Table
It fills you with the soft
essence of vanished flowers, it becomes
a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow
from the honey pot over the table
and out the door and over the ground,
and all the while it thickens,
grows deeper and wilder, edged
with pine boughs and wet boulders,
pawprints of bobcat and bear, until
deep in the forest you
shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,
you float into and swallow the dripping combs,
bits of the tree, crushed bees - - - a taste
composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found.
Let's help Feed America, whether with gifts of time or money, or sharing a meal with someone. And let's bring awareness to the issue of Hunger in America by educating our friends and family who may be unaware of this crisis. Here is a great video to share on the intertubez, that great technological articulation of interbeing.
Thank you, beautiful dKers for all that you do! Peace!
If you want to donate money, here is the Feeding America donation page.
If you have time to volunteer, here are some handy tools to find out what assistance is needed:
--Plug your zip code into this search engine to find opportunities in your area to assist hunger organizations.
--Typing in your zip code and state in this search engine will locate food banks in your area.
--Clicking onto to your state on this map will return results for homeless shelters and soup kitchens in your area.
Blogathon Schedule: All Times Eastern
Please visit those diaries you may have missed.
Saturday, Sept 25:
10:00a -- rb137 Feeding America Blogathon: Hunger Awareness (introduction)
1:00p -- teacherken Feeding America #2 - nutrition in schools
4:00p -- Patriot Daily Feeding America: City Ending Hunger Now
7:00p -- srkp23
10:00p -- boatsie
Owls -- Jay in Portland
Sunday, Sept 26
10:00a -- JanF
1:00p – Aji
4:00p -- Timroff
7:00p – Chacounne
10:00p -- blue jersey mom