When it comes to literal nourishment, the food we eat, life begets life.

Enjoy your food, enjoy your life.

We do children an enormous disservice when we assume that they cannot appreciate anything beyond drive through fare and nutritionally marginal, kid-targeted convenience foods. Our children are capable of consuming something that grew in a garden or on a tree and never saw a deep fryer. They are capable of making it through diner at a sit-down restaurant with tablecloths and no climbing equipment. Children deserve quality nourishment.

Because love encompasses everything, nothing is unimportant, including tonight's dinner menu. Think about it for a minute. If you were pure love, the loving parent of all life, how would you want people to eat?

I think preparing food and feeding people brings nourishment not only to our bodies but to our spirits. Feeding people is a way of loving them, in the same way that feeding ourselves is a way of honoring our own createdness and fragility.

I don't eat animals. I rescue strays and take injured pigeons to the wildlife rehab. I carry spiders and wasps outside in a cup covered with a 3x5 card. It would only follow that I'd take pause when contemplating the abrupt and apparently brutal ending of a tiny human being's life, or even a potential human being's life.