Peace Food

My husband rolls his eyes and calls me a hippie. In this regard, we couldn’t be any different. He’s a meat and potatoes guy. I’m a tofu ball in coconut sauce and brown rice girl. I'm working on him.

Many Buddhists in Tibet eat meat, as the climate and available resources there lend to little else. But all Buddhists are urged strongly to be meat free.

His Holiness The Dalai Lama – the great treasure of infinite compassion embracing all sentient beings, praise and glorify him – once caught his breath at the sight of a plateful of shrimp. He reasoned that the slaughter of an animal is wrong, but taking one animal’s life to feed many is better than the killing of so many tiny shrimp to feed just one person.

A big reason why this garden grows each summer is peace and kindness. Kindness to the planet, kindness to people, kindness to animals. By cultivating our own vegetables, beans, potatoes, and fruit, we are not participating in the ravaging of the planet that wide-scale, pesticide-ridden, mean to animals and insects, commercial food growing that goes on.

Kind to people is a natural out shoot of that. What’s kind to the planet is kind to us. We are this planet; this planet is us.

We also share our summer food with neighbors and colleagues, and even dogs, including our own, as well as our hamster, Wheat Germ.

By avoiding meat, kindness to animals is cultivated. When you finally come to realize that animals suffer just like we do, they feel terror and dread and pain and hopelessness, and they shrink from death in horror, your brain just detonates at the thought of participating in the impossibly cruel, treacherous, deceitful meat production industry. You stop giving them your money. Your mind grows supple. Your body thanks you.

My husband and I are talking about expanding the square footage of our food garden this summer, and adding apple trees to our small peach orchard. 

The more food we grow, the better we become, the better we serve this planet.

xoxoxo