Food in culture and community. What has it looked like in my life?
I've never really been prompted to reflect on my experience with food, but when I start to now, I think it shows how mindless I have been in regards to food. Growing up I ate a lot of traditional foods my mom would make. Since my family is from Mexico, this included foods like tacos and tamales and drinks such as horchata. I also gravitated towards a lot of typical American foods that were often unhealthy. For example, we ate at fast food restaurants a lot. I remember after church every Sunday we would go eat lunch, essentially cycling through all of the fast food places in our small rural town. Some of these include McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway, and so on. I was never very mindful about what was in the food, how it was made, where it came from, etc.
I started to become a bit more mindful about halfway through high school. I participated in a summer program about leadership, vocation, and social justice. I think a great part of this program was not only the curriculum itself, but the program's facilitator. She was a college student very involved in environmental activism and was thus very knowledgeable about the food system. She would share some of her own wisdom with us and whenever we would make food as a group, we'd always have a vegetarian and vegan option--this was something completely new to me, since no one in my family (and largely the Latino community) was vegetarian or vegan. We also did an exercise called mindful eating, in which we all ate a meal together but did not speak to each other or make any eye contact--the focus was on the food. We were instructed to think mindfully about each ingredient of the meal, the supply-chain involved in getting the meal to our plate, and the taste/textures of the food. This exercise was enlightening for me and always made me think more intentionally about the food I was eating. Today I think of myself as still in the process of learning about the role of food in my life.
