Food is sustenance; its need a common thread linking all creatures. And since what living creatures eat is other life—be it vegetable or animal—that means being eaten is as central to nature as eating is. It means that being born and growing up for the sole purpose of becoming someone else’s dinner is not only a valid reason for existence, it’s an essential one. It’s the ultimate service work in a world that requires it. That’s a humbling remembrance for our species, which has carved out a place at the top of the food chain, and largely eliminated the chance of being eaten—the chance of doing true service.

Oh, the occasional shark or grizzly bear may get through the defenses; and there’s nothing better than a cloud of mosquitoes to remind us that we can be food for the tiny as well as the mighty. But, in the current human existence, we are mostly in danger because of ourselves and each other—often for far less compelling reasons than because another creature needs to eat. Not being properly eaten, we are slowly eating each other, spirit first, and the world around us.

While we struggle with this, we still must eat; and nature knows something else about food. That is: food is simple, and directly from the earth. Food is not made in corporate factories by machines whose true product is profit. Food does not contain artificial additives or preservatives; nor is it engineered with magic tricks that scramble its genes. It is not packaged, not marketed, not even cultivated. It is provided by the grace of the growing earth.

Part of that grace is that the eaters must let the eaten flourish—if the eaten vanish, the eaters will too. Food is to be cherished and nurtured; respected as well as swallowed.

Nature seems to ask that we not do to food what would be an indignity if it was done to us. Being eaten is quite dignified: but being mixed with assorted harmful by-products, packed on a corporate assembly line into an insipid can, shipped for profit’s sake to someone too disconnected from the source to see my life inside of the can—I’d find that undignified. It would also be dangerous to the eater: for when you become what you’ve eaten, how can you know what you’re becoming if you don’t know what, or whom, you’ve eaten?

Nature has never seen fit to allow that separation. In the wild, eating is intensely intimate. The eater almost always meets the eaten, most often alive. In that way nature keeps the respect and connection between souls. Nothing feeds you more than the dignity and purity of the eaten; and I, for one, want to remember that when it’s my turn to become food instead of consuming it.