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Food
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Fasting, Kinda Slowly
I’ve fasted only once. I was with the Minnesota Outward Bound School in Canada and for the three weeks prior to my solo my brigade of ten girls had canoed and portaged from 5 A.M. to 9 P.M. daily — eating an unlimited amount of oatmeal for breakfast, sharing an occasional loaf of doughy bread for lunch, with two bowls of rice apiece for supper. We were always a bit hungry, but the beauty around us filled our souls and generally took our minds off our bellies.
October 1974
Quotations
Sunbeams
October 1974When you are at table, speak to none, keep your eyes lowered, and think of the heavenly table, of the food that is served thereon, which food is God Himself, and of the guests at this table, who are the angels.
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Cooking With Love
The only thing that’s written about more than food is love. What we eat has the potential to nourish or destroy, to cheer or depress, to excite or to bore, and the way a person cooks is as distinctive as the way he or she writes, sings, dances, paints.
October 1974Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
On Consumption
Thinking about food gets me thinking of consumption in general. How much is enough? Consumption without creation is depressing. People ain’t trees, and the food energy they take in ain’t meant to feed a sedentary entity. But the pressures sure are great, of satanic proportions, even, to consume, consume, consume. I’m all right as long as I think of that which I consume as a tool, a fertilizer, a catalyst. The higher the quality of my consumption, the more rapid my ascent to KRSNA’s side.
October 1974
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Food Co-Op: After The Revolution
“It’s not the hurdles that hurt horses,” a friend once said. “It’s the hammer, hammer, hammer of the hard highway.” And that’s kind of the way it is these days at Chapel Hill’s oldest and largest food cooperative.
October 1974
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Chewing It Over
Yom Kippur. The Jewish Day of Atonement. Along with my family, I used to fast, on this holy day, to expiate my sins, to assure that God would mercifully grant me yet one more year, during which, along with my family, I might sit every night before the TV, eating enough fruit and cookies to feed the whole block.
October 1974
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