To Lead or Be Led? 4 As you eat, honor your food and the habitat it was harvested from by
being more appreciative and less wasteful. Try to move beyond piling
on additional salt, sugar, and fat, and feel the contributions of each food
with its own texture, flavor, presentation, and color. Be mindful of the
gift of each to not only provide pleasure but contribute to your health—
not just from this meal but from future meals in the next month, the next
decade—indeed, your entire lifetime.
Also, consider the number of human hands you will never see that
came in contact with the food before you. Ponder what their lives are like
as they walk up and down fields, bending over to cut heads of lettuce,
climb up and down ladders to pick fruit, or carry out the same repetitive
movements over and over in slaughterhouses and processing plants as
their wrists throb with pain.
While enjoying your food, consider the uniqueness of this particular
moment in time as it marks the history of humankind. Contemplate
how your arrival on Earth fell within the. 0 percent micro-slice of the
Earth’s history since humans first roamed the planet. Reflect on the
99.99 percent of humanity who came before you and how their entire
time on Earth centered on securing enough food, while you spend your
time worrying about putting on extra weight and how to lose it through
exercise. For them, not having enough food was a fact of life. Taking
food for granted was never an option. You, on the other hand, have the
option to choose and act differently.
As you are contemplating your options, consider that you are the
beneficiary of choices made by unknown relatives you will never meet.
Think about what life would be like as a hunter and gatherer. Imagine
yourself traveling the savannah plains of Africa following a season of
plentiful rains. Off in the distance, you notice tall grass rustling. Your
mind instantly registers the swaying stalks with other clues like pockets
of wind swirls, unusual sounds of nature, recent tracks of predators, the
location of the Sun along the horizon. As your hair stands up on the back
of your neck, you stop.
Your survival and that of future generations hinges on your next
move. Do the signs you just observed point to much-sought-after food,
or are you about to become another creature’s source of food? Did the
rustling grass come from a momentary gust of wind, a lion on the prowl,