Yummy, delicious food presented in an appealing manner and all aroma can tantalize one’s taste-buds and make the mouth to water. But, and this is a big but, when the same food transforms to shit and garbage, spreading its stink all over how obnoxious it feels!
These are however, two sides of the same picture. It takes someone as magnanimous as the Earth to absorb all the shit gracefully and someone as graceful as a Plant to transform it into life again! This very simple food-cycle goes around in our environment on daily basis. Just think over it, think of all the processing the Earth has to do in order to transform all our garbage into soil and all the efforts that plants have to make to transform it to food again. It takes years.
Take Time To Digest
In our fast paced lives we are hardly left with time to think over this grave situation, that we forget that eating and digesting is also a tremendous job that the body has to perform. It is a huge task to transform food into human. Your body has taken up this job voluntarily. Give attention to this process, help the body in assimilation, by allowing it time for absorption and taking appropriate gaps between meals.
Eat Mindfully
Eating mindfully means to know your food. Treat your food personally relate to it like a person. Know how it was prepared, where the ingredients were bought, do you know the person who prepared it? How do you relate to the person who prepared it? All this awareness can take your eating experience to a totally different level. You start to feel the the food and enjoy it better than if you consume in a hurry or eat it mindlessly watching TV or texting on your phone. Eating mindfully helps in better absorption of the food.
Grow Plants
A hands on experience in growing simple vegetables like tomatoes or chilies can help to gain insight into the life of a plant… how the plant makes its way through the soil and awakens to the light above it. Home-grown veggies make the meals tastier as it has double the amount of ‘you’ in it.
Compost Pit
Make soil for your plants at home. kitchen wastes like peels, tea-bags, left-over food, which have no plastic or metal in them (as these two are difficult to decompose) make for an excellent compost waste. Take a medium sized pot with some soil in it, add the kitchen waste to it and top it again with a layer of soil. Doing this as a daily practice can get you humus rich soil for your kitchen-garden in a month’s time. This whole exercise heightens the awareness about how much waste is produced in our kitchens daily and how long it takes to decompose it.
Make the best out of waste, even if the efforts are not yielding any tomatoes or chilies, they can at least help increase the awareness!
Author: Jyoti Prateek