There is a story that has permeated various religions about two rooms. The first room is in hell, where the people have row after row of tables with laden with a feast of delicacies. Yet the people sitting around these tables are emaciated, moaning in hunger. In their hands, each held a long spoon, but their arms were splinted to wooden flats, so they could not bend their elbows to bring the spoons to their mouths.
In heaven, there is an identical room, with people in the same predicament of spoons. However, in heaven, the people sitting around these tables are comfortably sated. There, the people had discovered that it was only possible to feed each other, by reaching across the table with their long spoons to bring the food to each others' mouths, being fed depended on everyone being kind to one another.
Recently, Mark Bittman had an article in The New York Times called, Why I'm Not A Vegan. It's more a promo for his book, VB6 (Vegan Before 6), a lifestyle choice he made for health reasons. The idea behind VB6 is to basically eat vegan until dinnertime, although he admits to frequent cheating. It's very similar to meatless Mondays, forms of scheduled moderation for diet and health.
I've written previously on this blog about the concept of ahmisa, but today I'm thinking about community, and how eating is a communal act.
Even when a person dines alone, rarely did they grow or hunt their food themselves, or at least, not all of it. They are the end of a (typically) long producer/consumer chain. In most cases, this chain is invisible. It brings to mind an article I read several years ago about how the definition of "cooking" has changed in America to include opening and heating up a can of soup.
With its invisible status, this producer/consumer chain is not considered part of most people's communities. But what if our thinking were to change? What if we started seeing eating as a form of engaging with community - not just through dinner conversation, but through product consumption? It might mean that we want more of connection to said products - by knowing the farmers, by shopping locally, by gardening ourselves, and that a faceless corporation is not a good dinner companion.
And what if we went beyond that? Aldo Leopold suggested the idea of in A Sand County Almanac, "The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land." What if we considered the pollinators such as bees, or the microbes in the soil, part of our community? They certainly contribute to our food production. What does it do to our thinking then?
What sort of spoon could you extend?
