Was your food happy before it was your food?

The implications of your response are … huge, if not staggering.

• If you don’t know if the food you are eating was happy (in the ground, on the vine or tree limb, free-ranging or cage-free, not genetically modified or being fed such food) then, truth be told, you are living an ignorance that is causing difficulty or irreparable damage to your body, or is currently killing you.
• If you don’t know if the food you purchase was happy, then you do not understand that your food purchases help to create right livelihoods or wrong, food businesses that nurture well-being or foster degradation and death through lying, cheating, and poisoning, and that your food purchases are a political statement on a global scale. Migrant workers, import-export regulations, the trafficking of food, and its waste are all in your informed and thoughtful food purchase or your ignorance.
• Physically, you and I are what we eat. Food is the primary source of what the body needs to be healthy and to thrive. People used to be healthier, hands down. We include food in relation to the bio-chemistry of our physical body that creates or effects emotions as well as the functioning of our brain and the clarity of our mind.
• If you don’t know about your food being happy before it became your food, then you do not understand inter-connectedness, and the necessity of inter-dependence. As such then, the well-being of the soil, the food grown in the soil, the microbes necessary for the soil, or the rain, the pollution carried in the rain, the water table that is unseen yet vibrant to our planet’s well-being, etc etc, these things are either not known, not understood, or disrespected as not important by you. Again, that ignorance is killing you, everyone you know and care for, is killing the Earth, and is bankrupting all next foreseeable generations.
• If, however, you do know that your food was happy before it became your food because of self-education, conscientious food purchases, healthy food decisions, and Earth-based global participation in the resource of food, then thank you from all beings, including the cells, flora, and fauna of your body.

As said, the implications of your response to this seeming innocent or humous question are huge. They say a lot about you, your self or not-self centeredness, your philosophy of life, and scope of awareness overall.

This series of posts has one intention, and that is not to insult. Instead, it is to educate which according to its Latin root means to inspire. Small things are big things, as I often say in The Practice of Living Awareness. A small change makes a big one possible. A small awareness matures into more of the same. A small recognition leads to a tapestry of understanding. If everyone did the small right things that are within their power, finances, and cultural availability then the world would be changed into a happy place for everyone and every living creature. This series will focus on food, its livingness, and therefore yours and the Planet’s. Then after each post remember: You matter. You really matter.

(The word “you” is being used intentionally in these posts. This subject is a personal one, as in each person has the right to know and then the volition to act upon that knowledge. Using neutral pronouns such as “one” or “us” does seem appropriate to the individual responsibility that each of us has.)