“We feed the mouth, not the mystery.”
– L. Tommesa Mobley, Ph.D.
The land isn’t barren; our spirits are. Famine still walks the earth, but most of us know another kind. The kind that can’t be fixed with food. We can summon dinner like a spell. DoorDash, Uber Eats, anything we crave is a click away, but connection’s no longer on the menu. You can buy strawberries in December. You can find avocados in Alaska. Groceries can be waiting at the door. Yet, presence is out of stock. The world is stuffed and still famished. The body feasts while the soul fasts. We feed the mouth, not the mystery.
Science calls it malnutrition. I call it amnesia of the soul, the slow starvation that happens when spirit is left off the plate. Calories are not communion. Convenience is not care. And still, for all our abundance, few of us understand what food even does once it enters the body. We don’t know how it becomes us. We don’t realize how it builds or breaks us
The Body’s Alchemy
“Food is our first medicine, and digestion our oldest priest.”
— Ayurvedic proverb
Every carbohydrate eventually breaks down into glucose, the primary energy source for cells. Think of this as liquid light. Plants capture sunlight through chlorophyll; mitochondria ignite that light into life. Biophoton research confirms what mystics have always sensed: we are photosynthetic by proxy, living on secondhand sunlight.
Heat above 118 degrees Fahrenheit destroys not only enzymes but vitality itself. Cooked to convenience, our food loses its subtle current, the electromagnetic pulse that communicates with the body’s own field. Raw foods, rich in enzymes and prana, carry the original spark.
Protein becomes amino acids, the alphabet of flesh. Fats become hormones and cellular membranes. Carbohydrates become fire. It’s not metaphor; it’s metamorphosis. You eat sunlight made visible, and in return, you shine.
Digestion is alchemy in motion. In the mouth, amylase enzymes start breaking starch into sugar, signaling the stomach and pancreas to awaken. Chewing is spellwork: it tells the body, “We are safe enough to receive.” In the stomach, hydrochloric acid unravels protein into amino acids, the raw materials of skin, neurotransmitters, and thought. Fats insulate nerves and stabilize hormones. Carbohydrates become glucose that feeds the mitochondria, powering every heartbeat and prayer.
Meanwhile, trillions of microorganisms, the gut microbiome, conduct a secret civilization. They synthesize vitamins and regulate mood. They also train the immune system, and determine whether we live in a state of inflammation or balance. You feed them, they feed you. When the microbiome collapses through processed food, stress, or antibiotics, our perception narrows. Depression, anxiety, and rage are all forms of gut dissonance. The body loses its choir; the mind forgets its melody.
The Spiritual Significance of Food
“To eat is to remember.”
— Unknown
Long before we counted calories, we broke bread. Eating was a ceremony. It was an act of remembrance that life sustains life. To eat is to accept the covenant of reciprocity: to receive nourishment is to honor its source. Blessing food isn’t superstition; it’s frequency alignment. Gratitude slows the nervous system, reduces inflammation, and expands the heart’s electromagnetic field. Psychophysiology now calls this coherence; ancient traditions called it grace.
In my family, we still gather around food as if it were scripture. Sunday dinners, fish fries, cookouts, holiday spreads, each a communion of stories, not just plates. Meals are more than hunger management; they are love, memory, and transmission. Around that table, we talk about the old days. We retell the tales of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and family members the children will never meet. It’s how we keep them alive, how we feed our lineage.
This used to be the norm. Now it’s the exception. The ritual of shared meals was once a way to tend to memory and belonging. Now it has been replaced by isolated eating and screens glowing where faces once did. But every time a family sits together and eats in presence, they restore a broken thread in the human web. Food becomes ancestry in motion.
Blessing food and eating with presence reconnects us to that web. It is the practice of re-membering what we are made of: light, soil, and story. When we bless our meals, we turn consumption into communion.
The Gut, the Heart, and the Soul
“All truths are easy to understand once they are digested.”
— Galileo (attributed)
The gut isn’t just plumbing; it’s perception. Over ninety percent of the body’s serotonin is made in the intestines. The enteric nervous system contains more neurons than the spinal cord. This “second brain” communicates with the first through the vagus nerve. It forms a river of impulse that connects the stomach, lungs, heart, and head. Neuroscientists now describe this as the gut–brain axis, a feedback loop where digestion and emotion shape one another.
The heart, too, is more than a pump. It carries its own neural network capable of sensing coherence or chaos before the mind catches up. When the gut and the heart communicate freely, empathy flows. When they are congested by stress, processed food, or emotional toxicity, intuition falters. Candace Pert called this chemistry of feeling the body’s internal language: “the molecules of emotion.”
This axis between stomach and heart is the human moral compass. It’s how conscience gets felt before it’s reasoned. A clogged body can’t hear its own truth. A clear one knows instinctively what nourishes and what destroys.
Starvation of the Soul
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
— J. Krishnamurti
We’ve learned how to feed the body but not the being. The real famine is not in the soil but in the spirit. Moral degradation, apathy, and chronic distraction are symptoms of a culture that’s spiritually malnourished. The body overeats because the soul under-feels.
Sociological studies link nutrient-poor diets with higher aggression and anxiety. This confirms what sages have long implied: when our food loses integrity, so do we. Weston A. Price saw it nearly a century ago, when industrial diets replaced ancestral ones, physical degeneration was followed by social decline. Environmental philosopher Wendell Berry later wrote that the health of soil and soul is part of a single ecosystem.
Famine of meaning breeds a feast of noise. We scroll, consume, and perform because silence terrifies us. The industrial diet mirrors the industrial mind, refined, addictive, and devoid of life force. Soil stripped of nutrients grows plants that can’t feed us; a culture stripped of virtue grows people who can’t feel.
Re-Membering Communion
“When you bless the food, the food blesses you back.”
— Gabriel Cousens
To heal the moral body, we start with the digestion of food and of truth. Re-membering means stitching back what disconnection tore apart. We bless the meal, we taste slowly, and we speak kindly. Each act is a recalibration of coherence.
Eat consciously: chew, breathe, bless. Fast not only from sugar and seed oils but from gossip and grievance. Re-wild attention; let sunlight, soil, and silence feed you. Eat living foods, speak living words, do living work.
As Gabriel Cousens teaches, food aligned with light reawakens the cells’ intelligence. Studies on heart-brain coherence show that gratitude and compassion shift physiology toward order and harmony. When nourishment becomes multidimensional, character repairs itself. Integrity, empathy, and clarity are simply the body’s way of saying, I am finally fed.
The table remains our last altar. Every shared meal, every quiet bite of reverence, re-threads the web between flesh and spirit. The revolution will not be televised. It will be metabolized.
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