Ceremony.

Under what circumstances do we eat -- that is, what, if any ceremony prevails?  Is it sitting or standing, walking down the street, in the car while driving?  While watching television?  At a meal with others, and if so, is it stressful or enjoyable?  Is there a meal prayer?  The saying of grace?  Do we offer thanks, gratitude, blessings?  Or is eating merely an opportunity to fill up the tank as quickly as possible so as to get on with the day?  Or perhaps it's an opportunity for numbing, dispelling the gnawing inside?  Ceremony or ritual can structure our awareness to be awake and aware, to be alert, knowing that without our conscious focus, we could find ourselves prone to disorder, to being swept away.  Having ceremony can mean having a place at the table, and feeling welcome there can be an immense gift.

Lacking any formal or traditional ceremony, we often generate our own unconscious habits, such as eating while driving or in front of the television.  And often these habits fall short of providing the well being that the greater structure of more traditional ceremony provides.  Our default behavior gets us through without necessarily nourishing the body, mind, and spirit.  What's nourishing about ceremony is not just the food, but our kind, caring, respectful awareness attuned to the activities that give life to life.

Thirty years ago the Wall Street Journal reported that "even canned corn stumps modern cooks."  The article described how one company took the directions off their canned corn but then got so many complaints that they put the directions back: "Put the corn in a saucepan on heated burner."  One friend queried me further: Do you drain the corn or not?  A companion article discussed how people will pay not to cook -- that is, to have the same raw ingredients already prepared for you.  The conclusion was that people would pay three to five times as much.  By now it's probably a great deal more.

Ceremony?  Put the food in the oven or microwave and listen for the timer to go off.  Again, it's ceremony on the fly that does not provide the opportunity to learn how to stabilize and focus our awareness on relating with the material world; instead we fall prey to expediency. 

Edward Espe Brown, from No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice