Truthful thinking about food

A Buddhist prayer expresses that “much hard work” goes into what we eat, and gives thanks for this.

Have you ever reflected upon the hard work that goes into your food? If you eat mostly locally and from your own garden, then, you have. If you eat from the main stream food supply, you may not have realized how much it took to give you a simple snack, like an old fashioned peanut butter and jelly sandwich (perhaps served with a glass of milk/ soy milk, which may or may not contain Ovaltine.)

Ponder this.

The bread began with the harvesting and separating of grain, which was then transported to a mill and ground as flour. This was shipped to a bakery plant and mixed with other ingredients like yeast, preservatives, etc… who knows what, varies depending on the health level of the product. All of those ingredients were sourced somewhere. Chances are, animal products found their way in where you’d never expect them, and it’s hard to understand or identify all the things that go into the product.

But even if the product is the lesser evil, carefully, organically baked in a family-owned facility, there was still inevitably a great amount of work put into it to make that one loaf. Somebody had to pour ingredients into a hopper, someone else had to put the dough into an oven- there are machines involved, but humans do most of the harder work- the loaf is bagged, tied, and placed on a pallet, the pallet is layered, by a person, with cardboard sheets, alternating bread. The pallet is then sealed in plastic, then put on a truck, the truck drives however many miles to the grocery store- perhaps first to a warehouse- then it is handled by grocery store employees who stock, arrange, and possibly the person who scans and bags the bread for you to take home. You take it the final leg of its journey home to your table.

But wait- the sandwich consists of two other ingredients beside bread. The peanut butter, and the jelly, jam or spread.

The jelly begins its life in the fields of say, a strawberry farm, or a grape vineyard. Imaginably, this farm is located in a foreign country, so there is a great amount of labor required to package, export, import, and ship the product to the jelly distillery. Most of the picking will be done by hand. The fruit is usually washed at the source, then loaded into trays, although, if it is being shipped industrially it can be processed, such as grinding it up into a syrupy pulp, and freezing it, or packaging it into 5 gallon buckets. This function does not demand the highest quality fruit, because the consumer will never inspect the raw ingredients, and dye can always be added later. So the industry will probably use up stuff they can’t sell on the shelves, though it could be of the exact same quality. Then, after all that, the raw stuff, along with other raw stuff, like sugars- not from cane most likely, but probably distilled from sugar beets or corn, is combined into a sticky mess which is boiled up and bottled. Other stuff like gelatin, made from meat industry bi-products, may also be thrown in for good measure. Then, the same distribution saga is repeated as with the bread.

The peanuts are harvested from trees, probably with small hand tools- I don’t know of any equipment which can pick a tree clean- and somewhere along the lines, before or after the same exhaustive collecting and shipping, the nuts have to be shelled. Not sure if this is done by hand or not. Then, however many longshoremen, sailors, or cargo airport employees handle it, there may be a train ride somewhere, and off to various truckers, and people with hand jacks or pallet jacks, in the peanut butter plant, where the nuts are loaded into hoppers by the ton, and churned out into an oily paste, before being loaded into the traditional plastic or glass bottles and sent off to you.

So, for you, it takes about two minutes to take out the bread, possibly toast it, spread the peanut butter and jelly on it, slam the two sides together, maybe cut it in half, possibly pack it up for later consumption by you or someone else, or pour milk/ soy milk, add the chocolate drink mix if applicable, and start chowing down. But in total, to feed you that sandwich, the process took much longer. You can just imagine the work that went into a more extravagant meal! Add a whole extra process for restaurant food, or frozen meals….

Food is sacred, but it is not treated that way in modern culture. Corporations trading natural harvests as an industrial commodity, and manipulating their genomes, are responsible for the desecration of food.

Now what? How are you supposed to react to this? Just be conscientious and thankful of what you eat, that’s all. And know that getting something from your local farmers, or better yet, from your own back yard, is the high road, and the healthier alternative, whenever possible. Of course, meat avoidance is good for you and the Earth, since quite a bit of land and resources are required to raise livestock for slaughter. And do it soon, because the rest of the infrastructure; going to the store, etc...is coming to a halt.

If you’ve not allowed yourself to think of clear truths like this, you’ve been living in denial. Time for awakening. (This is not a judgment. Just a friendly tap on the skull. Your author is only beginning to understand this very stuff.)

Eat well!