vegilicio.us

Choosing Food Mindfully, Eating Food Mindfully

This past weekend, I participated in another meditation retreat. As we were getting ready to break for lunch on Saturday, the instructor said, "Oh, and we will be practicing functional silence during lunch today. So, everyone should remain silent, so that we may all be mindful of the experience of eating."

At first, my introverted self thought, "Hurray! No awkward small talk with strangers!" My second thought was, "Um, this is going to be weird."

And it was. Weird because the experience stood in such stark contrast to the way I eat almost every other meal. I am either socializing with others, or checking email, or flipping through a magazine, or watching TV. How rare to just sit there, in silence, and only pay attention to the experience of eating.

The instructor said, "The best seasoning for food is mindfulness." And surely that is true. For as hokey as it sounds, simply paying attention did intensify the taste of each bite. (It also made me realize how noisy baby carrots are.)

I have tried in the past to be mindful in this way.

Several years ago, I had a colleague who was a nutritionist. She told me a story about a man who survived the Holocaust. He credits his survival of the death camp to the fact that he chewed each bite of food, no matter how small, fifty times. The extended chewing improved digestion, increased the availability of nutrients for absorption, and extended the satisfaction of eating. He, and his small group of friends who followed this practice, feel it saved their lives.

Fifty bites didn't sound like that big of a deal to me. Until I tried it. That is a lot of times to chew your food. So I then tried twenty five. Twenty five is a lot of times to chew your food.

A few years ago, I picked up the book Eating Mindfully. I remember it went on and on about savoring each individual granule of salt on a potato chip. Feel it dissolve on your tongue, it said. I think my bookmark is still on that page, the one about the salt and the potato chip.

So my earlier attempts to be mindful while eating failed miserably. But this weekend showed me that there is something worthwhile to the idea of eating mindfully, and it is something I can actually do. As a vegan, I feel like I already have a mindfulness about my food that typical omnivores do not. But there is a difference between being mindful about choosing what I eat, and being mindful about actually eating it. 

I don't ever expect myself to become a fifty-time chewer, or a salt-granule savorer. But surely I can slow down, take a breath, and just enjoy the sweet taste (and sound!) of a baby carrot.

Those Buddhists really get me down.

This past weekend, I went to the second part of a meditation series (read about Part I.) These are Buddhisty folks, which certainly made my eating requirements for the event way easier. Veg options are always plentiful, and, as a bunch, I tend to think of these Buddhisty types as pretty veg-sympathetic, if not veg themselves.

So, it's the second day, and I am chatting with a lovely woman who is one of the organizers of the weekend. I had met her last July, and I had been impressed by her. Somehow the topic of vegetarianism comes up (presumably because we were eating at the time), and she first launches into this monologue about how humans are "designed" to eat meat (some sort of theory about our teeth.) But then, in some seemingly strange attempt at showing solidarity, she talks about how meat is so "different" now than how it used to be. It's so fatty now. Oh how the quality and healthfulness of meat has declined! So, really, it's understandable you wouldn't eat it. And then there's contamination risks, blah blah blah blah blah.

There I am, talking to this Buddhist woman (and she is actually full-on Buddhist, BTW, and not just Buddhisty) listing all the reasons why one might abstain from meat and waiting for her to give the obvious reason why a person (much less a BUDDHIST who follows a precept about protecting life) might choose not to consume animals!

And I wait. And she's talking. And I wait.

So finally, in my most compassionate, least aggressive, quiet tone, which might have even suggested that the idea had just occurred to me, I said, "And, well there's also that little thing about the suffering of millions and millions of animals. That would be a reason not to eat meat."

"Oh, right!" she said. But before I had a chance to feel too superior about the whole thing, she took me down a notch by letting me know that the Dalai Lama eats meat.

Well that changes everything! Bring out the spit!

It was so discouraging. How much more obvious could things be? I say that, yet at the same time recognize that the entire system of industrial food production is actually predicated on things not being obvious - on the relationship between the piece of meat that ends up on our dinner plate and the living, breathing being who was slaughtered in pain and fear being completely obscured.

But if this kind and generous woman who has sought out a life path of compassion and wakefulness - of being aware - won't see it, what hope is there for the rest of the planet?