Eating with awareness starts with the attitude of "a meal is a matter of imperial importance"

Older Taiwanese people often like to say, "A meal is a matter of imperial importance," and even their favorite greeting when meeting one another is, "Have you eaten yet?" From this we can see that "eating a meal" is no small matter and must be approached with care. But in modern life, people are busy, and many families rarely sit down properly for a meal together. Adults are busy with work, children are busy with school, and all three meals are eaten out, so everyone gradually becomes part of the "outsiders" crowd, the population that eats out. This kind of urban lifestyle has made the dining room and kitchen, once the heart of family life, less and less important, and the scene of family members gathered around a table happily eating and chatting is becoming rarer and rarer.

In fact, food and eating are an indispensable and important activity every day, and they are also the heart of maintaining family bonds. Even more important, through eating we pass on an attitude toward food. Humans must eat to survive, and in order for us to live on, countless living things have given up their lives. Whether vegetarian or non-vegetarian, every time we eat we receive the immense grace of countless lives. How can we not feel gratitude?

Words of thanks before a meal: "I receive your life!"

Farmers plant rice and vegetables and raise chickens in the fields, and in the process, in order to harvest food, many small lives have to be sacrificed, such as the little insects in the fields and the small fish and shrimp in the ditches. All of this is like a miniature of the natural world's food chain and food web. Standing at the top of the consumer pyramid, every bite of food we take has been fed to us by countless lives.

Before eating, Japanese people always say a phrase, which Japanese dramas often translate as "Let's eat!" In fact, that is completely wrong. In the past I did not understand the meaning of this phrase either, and only after reading an article by Dr. Li Xuying did I learn its deeper meaning. It turns out that it is spoken to the countless lives that have given their lives so that we may live: "I receive your life!" A single word of thanks expresses all the humility in the face of the earth's gifts.

"Eating" is the great matter of each day. With three meals a day, what exactly should we eat? How can we eat in a way that is both healthy and friendly to the environment? Unfortunately, most people do not care at all about the food they put into their stomachs, no longer pay attention to where the ingredients come from, and sometimes have no idea what they are eating.

The development of world trade and rapid economic growth have given city dwellers "whatever they want, no matter what day of the year it is." As a result, many exotic ingredients consume enormous amounts of energy, traveling by plane or ship across the ocean merely to satisfy the desire of the palate. To keep ingredients fresh, the entire journey is transported at low temperature or frozen, and the energy loss is impossible to count. Even if processing technology is highly advanced, the nutrients in the ingredients themselves still decline with time. So after consuming enormous amounts of energy to travel a long distance to our hands, what we eat is nutritionally poor food.

This is also the core value behind the call by the famous conservation scholar Dr. Jane Goodall and others to "eat local, eat in season, and use food to bring back a green Earth." Plants grow under different conditions of soil, water, and climate, and there will certainly be subtle differences. Eating ingredients produced near where you live, freshly harvested and with their nutrients fully preserved, is of course better for your body. It also does not consume any energy for transportation, and buying locally can help local farmers. Why not do it?