by Betsy Keokosky

IMM Earthcare spent the first half of last year reading and discerning on the food sections of “Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation” by Paul Hawken. It informed us that 35% of the world’s carbon emissions come from food production and processing and that “today’s food system has become the single greatest cause of global warming, soil loss, chemical poisoning, chronic disease, rainforest destruction and dying oceans.” 

There are multiple ways of understanding these words, “mindful eating.” It encompasses a wide range of things, such as paying attention to the sensory experiences of taste, touch, and smell that are the pleasures of eating; paying attention to food as the nutrition that builds our bodies and health; paying attention to where and how our food is coming from. 

Quakers, I think, also tend to connect mindful eating with our outsized human effect on this planet. Mindful Eating was the theme of New York Yearly Meeting’s January 2023 issue of their Spark newsletter* and the editors defined mindful eating as “Nourishing All Life While Nourishing Ourselves.” 

To me when we look for the spirit in mindful eating, we are looking for connections like Thich Nhat Hahn’s conception of “interbeing,” or Donella Meadow’s “system thinking,” or Robin Kimmerer’s description of “indigenous wisdom.” Mindful eating is not just a set of rules to eat less meat or avoid processed food. For better or for worse, we are all crowded, more closely connected on this planet, and we can no longer act without consequences. We share them.

Mindful eating is, for me, the understanding that we are part of the slow unfolding that is the miracle of growth and decay. We are not outside looking in, but participate in this planetary ecosystem, in a deeply organic way. I call this “spirit” or “sacred” because what can be more sacred than the intricate interrelationships –which we cannot begin to understand– of life, time, and space on this planet. If we think of how billions and trillions of beings co-exist with us, big and small, short-lived and long-lived, each experiencing time and space from the vantage point of their own scale and life span, what does that do to our own human-centered sense of reality? We are all living side by side with vastly different experiential perceptions of what the world is like, each encapsulated in our own bubble of sensory filters. Yet we are interdependent and overlapping in ways that are incredibly complex. How do we even comprehend this? 

The food chain is part of this amazing logic that inexorably connects us all. We humans have brought ourselves to the top of the food chain, but we have yet to understand how truly interdependent we are on others that need a place at the table. Let us open our eyes to the spirit and find a love and gratitude that nourishes all life, even as we are nourishing ourselves.

*An expanded booklet version of the Spark issue on Mindful Eating includes articles by several IMM people: Betsy Keokosky, Margaret McCasland, Cai Quirk and Joshua Quirk. It is available at www.nyym.org/sites/default/files/Mindful-Eating-booklet.pdf.