Ask Ajna 
with special guest, Ahimsa

Eating Gratefully on the Food Chain

Dear Ajna: I eat as low on the food chain as I can in order to do as little harm as possible to other creatures. Occasionally, a meat eater will say to me, "I just say a blessing of gratitude for the animal's spirit, and then everything's okay." But surely animals, like people, would prefer their lives to my gratitude, don't you think?

May I suggest a middle of the way approach? Eat what you feel comfortable with, but do be sure to include a blessing for the plant, the forces of nature that helped the plant to grow, and the human hands that were involved with growing, picking, packing, delivering and selling the food. Too often we get caught up in food formulas and forget the mystical aspect. 

To delve into the world of divas, elementals and overlighting angels, look up the Findhorn Garden books. Findhorn is a little town in the north of Scotland that became home to a community of people who became adept at communicating with the hierarchy of angelic plant helpers. These invisible helpers told the human channelers that they were sad that people no longer tried to communicate with them. They said that the mechanized way of planting, cultivating and harvesting food was not as nourishing for the plants or for humans as when people did the work directly and were involved emotionally with planting and harvest celebrations. We can help offset the negative effects of mechanization by asking a blessing at each meal and by consciously increasing our connection with nature in general.

Aboriginal peoples worldwide have valued the spirit life of plants and animals, so that whenever they took anything for food they gave something back in the way of honouring its spirit and what it had to teach them.
Ajna

We must take life to live. But we can choose how much life, and at what cost in pain and suffering. Even if plants are sentient, as I suspect they are in a very basic way, many more plants must be killed to feed an animal raised for food than if we eat the plants instead. So the less meat we eat, the fewer lives we take.

It's a harder call if an animal has been given a good, if short, life on a humane farm, foraging on land unfit for crops, or if a wild animal has been hunted for protection or population control. But think about it: could you bear to sell your healthy young pet dog or cat to your neighbour for a barbecue? Being human means that what's food for our bodies must first be food for our thoughts. Ahimsa