In this season of holidays, gathering with family and friends, eating good food and being thankful, I want to remind us to practice terraphilia as we eat by saying grace to our food. Not for that food, but to the creatures and plants who gifted their lives and their cells for our nourishment.
Every bit of your food except the minerals like salt (and perhaps even the microbes the salt crystals may incorporate) was alive before that food came to you. No matter what your diet, whether you’re vegan or vegetarian, omnivore, gluten-free; pescatarian or frugivore, if you eat, you are eating other lives.
That is the way of life: everybody eats somebod(ies) else. The only way to not consume other lives is to not eat. It is important to acknowledge that all of our food had an existence before we incorporated that existence into our own bodies. And it is equally important to express appreciation for the gifts of those lives.
That bite of turkey from a Thanksgiving dinner (for those who celebrate the US holiday) is easy to recognize and acknowledge: “Thank you, turkey, for giving your flesh and your life to me.” If you’re eating plant-based turkey, you’ll be saying thanks to the soybean plants for eating their seeds—the next generation of soybeans’ lives—and to also thank the other lives that are incorporated in the not-turkey.
What about the mashed potatoes in a traditional American Thanksgiving meal? We can say thank you to the potato plants for sharing their tubers, which would otherwise sprout new plants, so in a sense we are eating their kids.
But there are more lives in those simple and yummy mashed potatoes: The cooked tubers are mashed with butter (thank you, cows, for giving us your milk, or thank you to the plants whose kids—cashews or other nuts, perhaps—went into making your plant-based butter), salt from salt flats where the crystals grow in association with all sorts of microbial lives (thank you, salt flats and microbes), and milk (thank you cows again!).
The black pepper we may grind over our mashed potatoes comes from the seeds of a perennial vine native to the Malabar Coast of India—thank you, pepper vine for giving us your seeds (your future kids) to grind on our potatoes and flavor our food.
And that slice (or two) of classically American pumpkin pie? We thank the pumpkins, of course, for the flesh of their fruits, which would otherwise feed a fox or a raven, who would in turn carry the seeds in that creature’s digestive tract and excrete them in a pat of fertilizer far from the parent plant where they could sprout new pumpkin vines. (Pumpkins, by the way, are native to the Americas.) We thank the chickens for the eggs that make the pumpkin custardy, the beet sugar or cane sugar plants for sweetening that custard.
The pumpkin pie spices—cinnamon, the tree that gives its bark for the spice; nutmeg, the woody seeds of a tree native to the islands of Indonesia; ginger, the underground stem of a flowering plant grown in southern Asia; allspice, the dried fruits of a tree native to the Caribbean region; and cloves, the flower buds of a tree that grows in Indonesia. In thanking these spices for contributing vital parts of themselves and their lives to flavor our food, we think globally, sending our appreciation around the world.
And then there’s the crust, with its wheat seeds in the flower, butter (thank those cows one more time!) or shortening (that would be made with oils ground from plant seeds like sunflowers or canola, a type of mustard), and perhaps chickens again if the crust was brushed with an egg wash before filling.
You can see how saying grace to and thanking our food could be so time-consuming we’d never get to eating! We don’t have to thank every being we eat every day. But saying grace to at least some of our food every day will help us eat more mindfully and perhaps even waste less of our food. (Estimates are that around 40 percent, between a third to half, of food in North America goes to waste between farm and table. Yet all across the world there are people without enough to eat. That’s immoral.)
An idea for a daily practice: At one or more meals, pick one food to notice and thank. Imagine the life or lives of that food, where in the world it grows or lives wild, and thank that food for becoming part of your flesh and your life.
In this time of Thanksgiving, let’s take time to appreciate the myriad of lives that go into our food, and acknowledge the living community we depend on in the most basic ways, to sustain us, inside and out.
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Read on for more about how our food becomes “us” at the cellular level. And how eating locally can root us in place and community.
Saying grace to our food and being mindful of what we eat is very much a part of practicing terraphilia. It’s also healing for ourselves and this earth. The latter because the way we produce food in developed countries adds to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, strengthening climate change and disrupting everything about life on earth from storm cycles to the ability of life as a whole to survive on this planet.
The amounts that industrial food production contribute to CO2 accumulations vary by the type of farming and food production. Food production as a whole, including growing, processing and transporting food from farm to table, accounts for about a quarter (an estimated 26 percent) of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
Growing livestock for meat and dairy is responsible for an estimated one-third of those CO2 emissions. (That includes crops like corn grown specifically for livestock feed.) So the meat and dairy industry accounts for about one-sixth or 17 percent of global CO2 emissions.
But meat alternatives are also environmentally costly, especially processed ones: soybean farming in the US Midwest, for instance, relies on synthetic fertilizers and synthetic herbicides, which themselves are produced with copious amounts of natural gas, adding their mite of CO2 emissions. Those fertilizers also run off into the Gulf of Mexico, contributing to the “dead zone” in the Gulf where over fertilized waters are devoid of oxygen and thus, life. Processing those soybeans and other ingredients into alternative meats requires fossil fuels, as does transporting them from factory to store to table.
To me, the question of how to eat in a way that is healthier for the planet is less about meat or no meat, but more about the scale of farming and eating locally. Farming on a smaller scale, especially organic and regenerative farming, tends to be less harmful for the planet, and contribute less CO2 to the atmosphere. And eating food produced locally generally means less wasted food because the travel time from farm to fork is less, and of course that travel involves less distance too, and thus less CO2 is emitted along the way in the form of use of fossil fuel.
(Those blueberries from Chile we North Americans eat, for instance, come by ocean freighter from one hemisphere to another. Ocean shipping is among the least efficient methods of shipping on the planet in terms of the fossil fuel required to move ships thousands of miles across water.)
And then there’s food waste. Estimates vary because it’s difficult to pin down how much food goes to waste between farm and table, but in the US, it looks like as much as 40 percent of our food is wasted. That wasted food contributes about as much CO2 to the atmosphere each year as 42 coal-fired power plants, according to the US EPA. And that doesn’t count the amount of climate-change-fueling methane gas that food emits as it rots (around one-quarter of US landfill “waste” is food).
I’m not going to wade into the argument of what diet is best for the planet. There is no one “right” answer. It’s different for every body and every place. I’ll just say that whatever we eat, the more mindful we can be and the more local, the better for this earth.
Practicing our terraphilia in choosing what foods to eat is also healthy for us. We are what we eat at the most basic level: Cell biologists say that the molecules in our food become the materials we use not just to stoke our metabolisms and keep our bodies working, also to replace the continual loss of our own cells.
The proteins and minerals, lipids and antioxidants in our food become the us; the molecular components of skin, hair, synapses, organs, muscles and bones are literally formed of our food and the environment in which our food was raised.
What we eat thus nourishes us at many levels: It fills our guts, quieting the physical and mental pangs of hunger. It provides the molecules to build healthy bodies, hearts and minds. It nourishes our senses through flavor and texture, and our emotions with feelings of well-being and pleasure. Food affects who we become, inside and out, body and soul.
Sharing food reinforces our bonds to our families and friends in the human community even as we connect our cells to the community of species that make up this earth. As we share food and celebrate our connections, let’s honor what we eat by saying grace to the lives we consume. By making our meals delicious and restorative rituals, acts that stimulate our connections to this living Earth, and sustain our inner and outer selves.
NOTES:
An informative chart showing the breakdown of food production and CO2 emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/food-ghg-emissions
Food waste and CO2 emissions: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2022/01/24/food-waste-and-its-links-greenhouse-gases-and-climate-change
Thank you for supporting Practicing Terraphilia. May your holidays be joyful and full of love and generosity!