Mindfulness at Mealtime

Let us lift glasses of excrement
from yeast glutted on grape sugar
until it suffocated in its own waste,
and remember people thought it
was the best they ever tasted when our
Lord made it miraculously from water.
May the dead animals and plants before us
forgive our mastication of their corpses,
and may the constituents of our salad
forgive their tormentors
as we tear them with our teeth
and leach away their lives in our stomach acid.
Let us pray their pain be minimized,
even if we cannot hear them scream.
May they forgive the ignominious burial
we will give them tomorrow
when we flush them out to sea.
We thank them for their unwilling sacrifice,
that we might live.
All we can do for them now
is to honor them with our appetites.
Taste, chew, and enjoy!

Oooo, yum!

Because we are animals rather than plants, we must kill, or at least wait for something to die, in order to eat, and we must eat in order to live. Even if we eat only fallen fruit, it is still alive when we eat it, and we cannot avoid ingesting microorganisms, which we then kill in our digestive tracts before they kill us. So a word to vegetarians — just because you can't hear them scream, doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. Here is a taste of Mindfulness at mealtime, a meditation on "Thou shalt not kill," if you can still eat.