Eating is a sacrament. The grace we say clears our hearts and guides the children and welcomes the guest, all at the same time. We look at eggs, apples, and stew. They are evidence of plentitude, excess, a great reproductive exuberance. Millions of grains of grass seed that will become rice and flour, millions of codfish fry that will never, and must never, grow to maturity. Innumerable little seeds are sacrifices to the food-chain. A parsnip in the ground is a marvel of living chemistry, making sugars and flavors from earth, air, water. And if we do eat meat it is the life, the bounce, the swish, of a great alert being with keen ears and lovely eyes with foursquare feet and a huge beating heart that we eat, let us not deceive ourselves.
— Hale Sofia Schatz, Shira Shaiman, If the Buddha Came to Dinner