death for life

I've been reading a deep, thoughtful and powerful book called Food and Faith which has helped to refine and articulate what I had already known intuitively about food. One of those big themes is around death, and namely, that there must be death so that we can live. There is no eating without death and we obviously cannot live without food.

Sometimes I get annoyed that I must eat several times a day. The work, time and effort involved gets in the way of the other things I want to do! But I've started thinking that the acts of growing, harvesting, preparing, cooking and eating are the point. They remind me of how interconnected I am to the world and how dependent I am upon the earth.

In the introduction to Food and Faith, Stanley Hauerwas writes, "Put simply, [Wirzba] reminds us that we eat to stay alive but we must kill if we are to eat. So "eating is the daily reminder of creaturely mortality."" Even with my plant-based diet, I literally remove the fruit from it's vine to eat it. I pluck the leaves from their stalk and pull the vegetables out of the ground.

Eating reminds me of my humanity - that I cannot ever exist entirely on my own, that there is no such thing as "self-sufficiency." The death of other living things gives me my life. What a powerful parallel to how Jesus' death and resurrection have given me life, both in this world and the next.

May I be more mindful of all these things as I eat.