Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

Thanksgiving

November moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! It is also the weekend of the national holiday we call Thanksgiving. It is the one time of year when nearly everyone in America prays over their meal and gives thanks for the food on their plates. It is the one day when the web of connection that feeds us all on every day of the year emerges from the mists of invisibility to shimmer in the light, and all of us glance at it for a moment of wonder and awe. It is a rare occasion when America as a whole expresses its gratitude instead of its longing or dissatisfaction. And to me, that makes it a precious moment indeed.

But before I go further on this theme, you may have noticed that I have not sent out a new moon newsletter in a few months. This isn't because the email list isn't working. It's not because I've gotten lazy and am no longer working myself. On the contrary, I have been working so hard that I haven't been able to make the time to send out one of these letters in a few months. After much thought and angst about it have had to admit that -- alas -- I simply can't keep up with a monthly commitment to write it.

I thought about throwing in the towel altogether, but the fact is that writing these eletters is a precious opportunity for me to express what I hold most dear, and I don't want to give it up. So I've decided that as a compromise I will send out occasional letters, perhaps on a holiday such as this, or a solstice, or an equinox, or a new moon -- I'm not sure yet when and I make no guarantees but I'm going to give it a try and see if it works.

And as part of my practice of gratitude, I want to thank all of you who have emailed me back from these letters over the years and expressed your own gratitude for them -- as well as those in the past few months who've asked me gently where the letters have gone. I am moved that you noticed, and that you missed me -- Thank You!

I think it is so important to give thanks, and yet I find that I don't come from a particularly thankful culture. I have noticed this particularly when it comes to food.

When I was growing up, the only times we said grace at a meal were on Thanksgiving, or when we ate at my maternal grandparents' house -- which was often a religious holiday such as Easter or Christmas. I think this was fairly typical for middle class, urban and suburban, progressive, liberal, non-church-going families such as mine. When my grandfather would say grace, I always felt a little uncomfortable. I was nervous and a bit embarrassed participating in a ritual that felt foreign to me and contrasted somehow with the rational straightforward world of my daily life. Saying grace made me feel inexplicably vulnerable, and it didn't occur to me until many years later, long after my pious grandfather had passed away, that that is precisely the point.

Two later experiences greatly impacted my thoughts and feelings about saying grace before eating. The first happened when I spent my last year of university at a historically Black college in Mississippi. I had thought that the food service at the Ivy League college in New England I had attended was bad, but when I first went to the cafeteria in Mississippi, I realized how good we had had it. This cafeteria offered students the same institutional food that I had been offered in my elementary school lunchroom. There were a few welcome Southern additions such as grits and greens, but all in all the food was pretty bad and we all lamented the fact.

Despite dorm room complaining about the food, most students in the cafeteria would bow their heads in prayer and thanksgiving before beginning to eat. I was both startled and moved to find myself surrounded by twenty-year-olds who were not embarrassed or uncomfortable praying in front of their peers. And to them there was nothing in the least incongruous about giving thanks for a few fish sticks and tater tots. I realized that for me grace -- when it happened -- was associated with big, special meals and tables so overflowing with dishes that my grandmother inevitably left the rolls in the oven until someone smelled them burning.

Of course, it was again me who felt embarrassed by this cafeteria praying, and realized with new clarity my own cultural specificity -- my background was Northern, urban, white, and secular. I don't think I had ever felt so vulnerable in so many ways as I did that year in Mississippi, and it was perhaps because of that that I found myself, on more than one occasion, making my way to the campus chapel on a Sunday morning to do something I had rarely done in my life -- attend church.

It was about ten years later that a second memorable experience happened to me related to giving thanks. Since my year in Mississippi, I had moved to California, fallen in love, gotten married, gotten baptized, and joined a church. I was becoming much more comfortable with prayer now that I did it both silently and aloud in church each Sunday, and said grace more often than I ever had before in my life. Over those same ten years, my work had become focused on food and all the issues surrounding it. I had begun to care passionately about how it is grown, raised, harvested, and prepared. I was becoming more committed each day to fostering a food system that was deeply ecological, relational, and artisanal in its orientation.

I decided to travel to Europe to see old friends, but also to eat and to learn about food and its cultural meaning there. I had just boarded a train -- I believe I was en route from southwest France to Lake Geneva, and as I was sitting in my seat I noticed a young couple sitting catty-corner from me. They were on the other side of the aisle, facing my direction behind a built-in table. I had a book, but I was so entranced with watching them that I could hardly read. They were both dark haired, olive-skinned and strikingly handsome. I guessed they were maybe seventeen years old. The boy had the longest eyelashes I'd ever seen, and the girl was shy and high-cheek-boned. They were holding hands and she was leaning on his shoulder and they were murmuring to each other sweetly in a language I strained to identify, but couldn't. I was struck by the fact that if it had been an American couple of that age, they would likely have been loud, overtly sexual, and annoying. Instead this couple was utterly intriguing in their young, demure love.

After about ten minutes of waiting at the station, the train finally started to move. As soon as we were underway, the boy reached under the table and pulled out a bag of McDonald's. From the bag, he removed napkins, then two cokes, two packets of French fries, and two hamburgers. Working together, the couple laid out their napkins neatly on the table in front of them, then carefully placed the French fry packs and the wrapped-up hamburgers on each napkin, and distributed the little packets of ketchup and mustard.

Once the meal was laid out, the young couple bowed their heads and prayed silently together. After the prayer, they began to eat their hamburgers with the most grace and decorum you could imagine -- peeling back the wrapper bit by bit and squeezing a bit of ketchup on the exposed bite, and then eating it slowly, chewing thoroughly, sipping the cokes daintily, and eating the French fries as they went along. They ate quietly, thoroughly enjoying their meal, rarely speaking except to extend some courtesy to each other. I tried not to stare, but I was utterly transfixed. When they were done, they slowly and carefully wrapped everything back up, folding the wrappers neatly before replacing them in the bag, putting the bag back under the table. And then the girl leaned on the boy's shoulder, he put his arm around her, and soon they were both asleep.

It is a moment I will never forget, because it was for me it was a profound revelation. By approaching that fast food meal as a form of communion, by giving thanks for it and eating it so graciously, they utterly transformed its meaning. I am convinced that that meal nourished them in a way that it never would have if it had been eaten in the usual disgusting noisy rush of the typical American fast food meal. It was impossible for me to see those two teenagers as the hapless victims of the evil globalization of a corporate food conglomerate. They somehow retained their sense of power and agency. By eating that fast food so slowly, by waiting for it so patiently, they turned its meaning on its head. They turned it into slow food. They managed to make of it -- somehow -- a beautiful meal.

Ever since that day, I have looked at saying grace and giving thanks as an incredibly powerful tool each of us has for nourishing ourselves, and for opting out of the cynical and rapacious commercialization of our foodsystem. Each one of us can, no matter what we are eating, make any meal a form of spiritual practice. We can transform it with our grace into a gift and a blessing.

At the Community Supported Kitchen that I started with four other worker-owners, saying grace has become a precious part of our daily work lives. At about 1pm each day, we sit around a table with the day's volunteers, interns, and dishwasher to share a nourishing meal. This being Berkeley, we join hands around the table and one or more of us prays aloud, giving thanks for the food, the farmers, the hands that prepared the food, for each other, and for whatever we are moved to acknowledge. It is an ecumenical thanksgiving -- we honor the diversity of our religious and spiritual practices by leaving most references to the divine out of it. But it is profoundly meaningful nonetheless. No one eats until we have prayed, and I sometimes feel that if our experimental business succeeds, if we are able to create a sustainable working model for community-scale food preparation -- it will be as much by the power of those prayers as by all the hard work we are doing. At a conference this fall I heard the phrase "to cultivate a culture of gratitude," and that is exactly what we are trying to do with Three Stone Hearth.

At home and in my own family, we also now pray before each meal. Quite often it is just a quick one: "GodblessusforourfoodAmen," but it matters anyway. I still get a bit embarrassed to say grace when I am out in public, but I am finding ways to do that too.

On this Thanksgiving weekend, and as we enter what is widely known as "the holiday season," may we all feel deep down inside that we are all of us already deeply blessed. May we remember that everyday we receive the most precious gifts of all -- food, shelter, clothing, and love -- the only things we really truly need. In acknowledging and giving thanks for these gifts, we are able to receive them most fully, most deeply. It is not so much our duty as our delight to give thanks and praise for the source of Life, and for the abundant gifts of this amazing Creation. It nourishes us, and we are full.

click to: book summary

Full Moon Feast Food and the Hunger for Connection by Jessica Prentice Full Moon Feast invites us to a table brimming with locally grown foods, radical wisdom, and communal nourishment.