One thing that has come up in a few recent conversations I have revisited is the idea of purifying the body to prepare for receiving food. One very wise elder told me that, as children, everyone would wash their feet before sitting down to a meal. I don’t know if that had anything to do with the fact that your feet are a lot closer to your food when you sit cross-legged on the floor, or to the general messiness of children, or to the incomprehensible dustiness of Indian streets, but the basic message was that the body should clean and pure in order to receive food. Another (not so) elder told me that in her youth, the women would wash their hair in the morning before entering the kitchen to begin preparing food. This was a about purifying the head before beginning the sacred work for preparing food to eat.
I love this idea, particularly because these traditions are from a time and a place where people did not distance themselves from nature with attempts at sterile living, as many of us do now. They would have lived in buildings made of either mud or a combination of cow dung and straw. They would have used dry cow dung as cooking fuel and cow urine as a disinfectant. These purification rituals were not about killing “germs” or getting rid of “dirt”. They were about the symbolic purity and cleanliness owing to something sacred. Food was recognized as a gift from Nature – a gift necessary for human life – and it was treated as such.
Photo: articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com
By stopping to prepare one’s body to cook or receive food, one cannot easily avoid thinking about the significance of the act. Cooking and eating are acts that deserve our full care and attention. Without them, we would not last long. There is real value in showing such respect and gratitude toward something so essential to our very being. It may not be a value that can be measured in economic terms, but in human terms it is immense.
I suppose there are purification rituals of sorts in many Western kitchens today. We wash our hands with antibacterial soap, we boil our dishrags (or simply use disposables), and we wipe our surfaces with bleach to ensure obliteration of any invisible organisms. This may be useful to an extent, although many people go way overboard with this, but we forget the symbolic purification to ready our bodies and our minds to receive, really receive, with gratitude this life-giving gift. (I can’t help but add that it must be far easier to feel this respect and gratitude when we are eating real, fresh foods that are recognizable gifts from Nature rather than the output of a far-off factory. I know that I feel a great deal more respect for the bean I have coaxed from seed to sustenance in my garden or the hand-picked lettuce from the farmers’ market than I could for a microwaved mystery patty I removed from a box.)
Something to think about the next time I feel compelled to eat a meal in front of my computer without taking time to stop, think about it, feel something, and eat mindfully.
