When I first heard the term “conscious eating” I felt like rolling my eyes because the idea seemed elitist and silly. Who has time to think about how they are eating? I was working at a high-end farm to table restaurant after attending a respected culinary program, and while I loved my job, the owners of the restaurant I worked at, and my coworkers, conscious eating felt like something only the patrons of the fancy restaurant could afford time for. I loved food, was often moved to ecstatic places by the mixture of pan-roasted morel mushrooms mixed butter, shallots, and fresh peas, but would rush to devour a burrito from the taqueria across from the restaurant before going in for 9-10-hour shifts. Most of us working in the kitchen had about 2 minutes to jam food into our mouths before evening service began.
While I enjoyed every flavorful bite of pinto bean, cilantro, and tomato, there was nothing “conscious” in my eating, in the eating of anyone I saw in the kitchen of the restaurant, or that I observed in the customers. ‘Conscious cooking’ ran through our fingers and synapses: awareness, attention to detail, and a sacred appreciation filled every task that my coworkers and I performed at that restaurant—we would work with whole hogs, whole fish, whole lamb, whole chicken, butcher every animal onsite, never waste any part of the animal that had given its life for us to work with. We used heads, feet, and bones of all of the animals in the stocks. Backfat and skin made way into our salumi and sausages. Vegetable peels were used for flavoring stocks and sauces, and if any parts were left, they were composted. Conscious cooking seemed like a natural extension of conscious farming and gardening, but ‘conscious eating,’ remained a foreign and lofty concept.
Years later, after working on an organic farm, studying for a teaching and writing career, and starting and engaging in that career for over a decade, the process of conscious eating has become less elitist of a concept for me. Conscious eating is way to pay homage to and appreciate what we have to nourish ourselves as well as a way to share that process with others. Yes, I still jam food in my mouth, usually leftovers, in between teaching class after class and running up and down stairs and from classroom to classroom to meeting room, but now the speed at which I and others eat does not seem get in the way of our conscious approach to this sacred act.
Perhaps conscious eating depends more on what an individual conceives of it than having any firm definition. For some, this approach might mean getting local organic products from farmers’ markets. For others, this awareness might be in slowly chewing and savoring each bite of the most inexpensive and mass-produced food because that’s all that can be purchased. While for another, the process of placing food on the plate, whatever the source of that food, and carefully arranging it, focusing on each detail of the leaf’s curl or meat’s fold, might be where consciousness comes in. Conscious eating then, appears to be more about the ritual, the process that we approach our food with. Some traditions we absorb from our cultural or familial backgrounds, and some we gravitate toward because we did not have these traditions or rituals growing up—the absence makes us pay attention more to what is missing and what we can fill it with.
While I do not engage in slow eating often, as you can probably tell from the above narrative, one of my favorite mindfulness and meditation exercises involves the eating of a raisin—yes, a single raisin. The process of eating starts with a visual survey of the raisin, noticing each crinkle and indentation, each shift in color and surface moisture. Slowly smell the raisin, smell the sun on a vine, how light once moved through the vessel walls, how the raisin was set out to rest in the dry heat of a valley summer, how it nestled with other raisins to reabsorb just the right amount of moisture. Place the morsel in your mouth, wait to chew, let it dance over your tongue and feel the release of salvia, the stomach below begin to send out messages that nourishment is on its way, the desire to bite, but wait. Slowly, as slow as one can, chew into the firm and yielding fruit, feel the resistance and give that has been building in the raisin for over a year, the verdant vine, sunset, rain on a field, hands plucking cluster after cluster, spreading out fruit, picking it back up, turning it over in crates, making its way into factory and box and your mouth.
Conscious eating is about imagination more so than it is about what or how we eat it. Imagine nourishment, imagine the work it takes to get that food to you, imagine what the magic of growth and sharing of that food can do for ourselves and others.