What Is the Intention of Food? Reading the Meaning Behind Food
Food has always carried the intention of death and rebirth.
In front of the cutting board, handling ingredients often brings this idea to mind, whether I am cutting vegetables or any kind of meat. The tissues of vegetables rustle under the knife, while meat is usually soft or sticky and tough.
Food enters the body, and through digestion it attaches to cells and is reborn; organisms are reborn, regenerate, or reproduce again, and dead food is reborn through the organism's body. Organisms pass through death and are then reborn through other organisms, continuing, continuing, and continuing again. This is what is called the food chain, and also what is called the cycle.
Death passes into rebirth, and after rebirth comes death; no object can escape this circle. Even soil still operates the cyclical intention of transformation and provision, and the newly added dead components melt into one again, evolving into nutrients that provide rebirth. Living things flee death, but they can never escape the end of life; all cycles are merely transformations that continue endlessly within the Earth.
Human beings are a very large organism, and there are probably few similar organisms on Earth that need such a large daily supply of food to keep the body running. But humans are in the role of consuming food, and this is more obvious than the role of supplying death to provide rebirth; no human voluntarily becomes a provider, so everything except humans becomes a provider; this includes pigs, chickens, ducks, fish, cows, sheep, shellfish, seafood... and as for plants, they are even harder to count in detail. As long as it does not affect the termination of life's operations, all living and non-living things may become regenerative food for humans; this is indeed how resources are used.
As a human being, is it possible to transform one's own existence into regenerative nutrients that supply the Earth, such as when we are buried in the soil and then decay into part of the soil? But today we do not do this.
The intention of food's death is the same as the intention of life's existence; one day we will all enter this cycle. When my knife cuts through tissue, the rustling, crisp sound is the voice of a living thing; I listen carefully and feel carefully, and my senses perceive along with the rhythm of the force in my hand. If I focus and let all of this proceed steadily, I can feel that this is the overlapping breath of death and rebirth.
When cutting scallions, I listen carefully; when cutting radishes, the temperature is icy cold. When cutting meat, the surface is sticky, and sometimes I rinse my hands with water to remove that uncomfortable clinging substance, perhaps because we are all such closely related beings.
Sometimes, I feel as though I am cooking with my senses, and I also enjoy the sensory input received in that moment. When no one disturbs me, I draw even closer to my relationship with the ingredients, and my intention is not only on cooking a dish well.