I know someone who starts every meal with a prayer of
appreciation for the hands that have touched her food before she did. Beginning
at the farmer, the truck drivers and purchasers, the preparers and chefs, she
makes her way through the chain of produce commerce before ending, neatly, with
gratitude for the food in her hands. While I would never openly say it, except
now because the internet is the great anonymizer, I found it rather silly. It
was dozens of hands that had picked her food, miles that it had traveled, by
the time it was something edible, it was incomprehensible to picture its
beginning.
Yesterday I ate an egg while looking at a chicken. It was a
well cooked egg, and I was extremely grateful for it. But I also know, looking
at that chicken, that it was most likely her egg I was eating. Having that
sensation is so rare in America (unless you are a farmer), but oddly
gratifying. The egg had moved from the chicken to my host mother, from my host
mother to my sandwich, and then to provide nourishment for my body.
Sometimes I go with my host brother to the fields where they
grow sugarcane. He cuts it down and gives it to me. I’ve become adept at
removing the green outside to chew the sweet center. I’ve drank sugar cane
juices in America, but never sat and chewed on one that was grown feet from me. I watched pineapple grow out of long bushes;
I’d had no idea where they come from. Besides a vaguely formed idea of a
pineapple tree, I assumed they appeared magically at the grocery store.
I don’t know the effect of becoming so separated from our
food. Tellingly, our distance from our food is neither just physical or just
emotional, but like all good conundrums, both. I feel a duality and
connectedness I hadn’t known before; rain is both beautiful and life giving,
the earth is both a stable landscape and a ceaseless provider, and my village
is kind men and women, who have bent to the ground to provide the food that I
receive.
Perhaps it is acceptable that we are so distanced from our
food. I know nothing of the latrines the workers on farms in America use; I am
unconcerned about whether they wash their hands. But the gratitude and
connectedness that I am able to experience here is so different. Lately I’ve
been sure, before meals, to bow my head and picture the path my food took to
come to me, and be thankful.
