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What Is Nourishment?
An Excerpt from If the Buddha Came to Dinner
By Hale Sofia Schatz with Shira Shaiman
Under the tutelage of my grandmother, mother and favorite aunt, I learned how to use all my senses to select the freshest vegetables and fruits in the market. I came to understand that the best, ripest produce carries a certain vibration – in its color and texture you can feet that it had been picked within hours. When I bit into the peach that we bought from the nearby orchard, the flavor and nectar burst in my mouth. I could taste the sun, rain and earth in that piece of fruit. I could feel its life force.
Those happy hours in the kitchen were my first encounter with the hearth of nourishment. I loved the regular rhythms of marketing, cooking and leisurely eating our meals together every evening with our cousins and other relatives who always dropped by. These rhythms connected me to my family and to my community. I intuitively understood that food's nourishing capacity far exceeded basic physical survival. Food had the power to bring a family together, to connect me to the earth and our planet's cycles, to nurture all my senses.