It’s common in our culture to blend ideas about how we eat & what we eat with what our hearts might say about what we’re doing to grow, spiritually. Lisa Turner explores this in this essay for the Huffington Post:
Soul Food: Spirituality and Nutrition
By Lisa Turner
Years ago, I spent a lot of time in an ashram. One of my jobs (besides less-glamorous stuff like cleaning toilets) was to cook in the kitchens. It was lovely. The food was simple, clean, pure; most of our meals were composed primarily of beans, rice and vegetables, but they tasted like the fare of five-star restaurants. I am convinced it was the serenity and open-heartedness of the people cooking, the melodic chants we sang as we stirred. The spirituality of the place entered the food — or maybe, we became more spiritual because of it.
In a well-known quote from Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating, authors Peter Farb and George Armelagos say, “Food to a large extent is what holds a society together, and eating is closely linked to deep spiritual experiences.”