Thou Shalt Feast no More at the Table of Life

I once spoke to a chef whose duty it was to provide The Last Meal for death-row prisoners, when the grim occcasion arose. He regarded it as an important, though small comfort to Souls facing the unthinkable---a physical comfort in the face of metaphysical panic, a crumb in the abyss. With great humility, he regarded his small role in these Souls' last moments of life, as a privileged one, and he carried out his duties with utmost earnestness and care. He recounted that most prisoners did ask for a Last Meal, and most ate their Last Meal.

The existence of this ritual evokes, perhaps deliberate, self-conscious echoes of The Last Supper, both exemplifying the symbolic significance of food in the human narrative.

There are also some ironic, unintended, but unavoidable intimations of the Christian story: The parallel between the condemned Nazarene and the dead men walking----many of them, like The Christ, innocent of any crime, but condemned to die by the might of hysterical mob-rule and by cowardly Governors, who, Pilate-like, fail to act in truth when called upon, allowing the sacrificial slaughters to proceed.

And, like Pilate, they wash their hands and afterwards return to rounds of stately banquets, with laden tables, untroubled that certain Innocents shall feast no more at the Table of Life.

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie
www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Eating the Peach

To eat is a privilege of the living, a temporal and a short one. We find knowledge of this in strange manifestations---none stranger than the ritual of the US death penalty, where, within the cold barbarism of the legal code, there exists the compassionate, even tender custom of The Last Meal offered to death-row prisoners on the day of execution. One might think ‘how could they eat at such a time?’ And yet, at such a moment, their love of life and all the privileges of the living, must be intense, magnified. From their perspective extremis how could they not savour their very last meal ever, when they will be such a long time without food? Perhaps the dead men walking partake of their Last Meal, reflecting, like Camus' Étranger, on all the ungrasped sweetness of life.

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Eating and Living in The Moment

The nourishment of food is what initially grounds us in the physical plane of being. Needing food is what makes us different to spirits, if we believe in spirits. The partaking of food, is the first and most intrinsic consequence of our physical existence in the universe and the non-ability to partake of food is a consequence of being dead. This might seem to state the obvious, but perhaps we would eat better quality food if we considered it from this perspective. Then we might take the advice of Indian mystic, Kabir, who urged:



If you are thirsty, drink now
for further down the road there are no wells
no rivers
nothing.
If you are hungry, eat now
for further down the road
there is no food.

Of course, he meant this in a spiritual way, but it might not be a bad thing to also take his advice literally. How terrible, to live life and never to enjoy one of the gifts of being alive, that of being able to partake of the fruits of the earth, the delicious, beautiful foods that nature gives us and instead pass on them and only eat bland, processed, synthetic foods.
Blessings on your table!

The Intellectual Foodie
www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com

Children and the Existential Significance of Food

The role of food is even more important in the life of a child than that of an adult. Food is how children first experience the world. When a child is born, the first thing it does, instinctively, is feed from its mother’s breast. Then all is well in its world, this new planet it has come to inhabit. There is order in its universe. For the first months and even years of a child’s life, food is central. It has nothing less than an existential significance. The physical nourishment of food, together with warmth and bodily closeness to its mother, circumscribe a child’s early life. They are everything. They form the template for the rest of the child’s life concerning feelings of safety in this world, or lack of safety. The sensation of taste and the satisfaction of a full tummy permeate the child’s subconscious.

Blessings on your table!
The Intellectual Foodie

www.your-healthy-eating-helper.com