It keeps coming back to me that pretty much everything we eat which has caloric (energy) value has at one time or another been itself alive.

It’s a fish eat fish world; and, I’m grateful for it.

• Cheeseburgers were once living cows
• Bread was once wheat, a living  plant
• Mushrooms are living representatives of the fungi family
• Milk was once living grass, which the cows ate and transformed for us
• Synthesized caloric food additives probably are made from a crude oil base,  which oil itself was once some form of life millions of years ago prior to its tranformation
• Fish, though possessing seemingly expressionless faces, certainly live, can feel and I’ve even heard them scream
• Bacteria break down, transform and recycle nutrients, are essential for human digestion and we eat some of them with every bite we take
• And so on…

It’s all part of food cycle integrity.

What about exceptions?

Well, things like salt and water, though essential for life, have zero energy value.

We may consider that plants for instance can fix carbon in the soil and air and use energy from the sun and grow without other life… however, even plants, when they die,  are broken down and become themselves nutrients for the next generation of plants. 

So, plants too eat plants.

In fact, healthy soils contain quite a great deal of decomposed plant matter for the living plants to feast upon. 

Additionally plants metabolize CO2, Carbon Dioxide, which animals breath out when they themselves metabolize what ever life forms they ate….

So through this cycle, plants too “eat” other once living things in order to grow, thrive, live, reproduce and evolve.

Thus for this point in our evolution anyway, the life cycle seems wholly integral with the food cycle.

It’s a life eat life to live kind of world.

So what?

Well, I eat meat.  I love it and am grateful for it.

And I eat veggies too.   Love them.  Am grateful for them as well.

Mushrooms too, yummy.  Thankful indeed.

And so on…

What I strive to do better now is to be consciously and truly appreciative for the bounty of my food and to be grateful for that which grew and surrendered its life so that I might be nourished by and made joyful through its existence and sacrifice.

Yours in life,

Yucel

( See also:  http://choose.ws/2009/10/28/spirituality/implications-of-life-cycle-dislocation-obesity/yucel/ )