From 'Love Letter to the Earth'

[Eva Libre]

Before eating, we may like to take a moment to reflect on our food... we vow to eat in a way that preserves our compassion and reduces the suffering of living beings. Someone without compassion can’t be happy, because they’re cut off from others and can’t relate to the world. We need to have compassion, too, for the Earth, our mother. When we eat, we think about all the people, plants, animals, and minerals that have contributed to producing the food on our plate - the earthworms enriching the soil, the farmer working the land, the people who harvested the crops - but we also remember the many species that have already died and vanished from the Earth because of our ways of eating and consuming.

Before eating, we breathe together and look at the food, appreciating the people who prepared the meal and all the conditions that have brought this meal to us. We know that this food is the body of Mother Earth and the body of the whole cosmos. We vow to eat in a way that preserves our health and well-being and the health and well-being of our planet.

- Thich Nhat Hanh, in “Love Letter to the Earth”.
Photo: © Béatrice Lechtanski