Gift Giving Food

Food Fight #33 - Messing With Tradition

In societies keenly aware of their interdependence with the rest of the natural world, gifts of food are common and normal. Gifts are given to consume now and that can produce more food later.

We already know food has the power of healing. Why not place the power of health back in someone's hand as a gift they will use everyday? Buy them a fruit or nut tree and help them plant it. Help someone start a garden of perennials. Give one or more of the many tools needed. Work together to preserve food for winter. Build a greenhouse or green room. Install some rain barrels or dig a well. Give someone a fish, teach them to fish and teach them to make a fishing pole. Give some land. Feed their soil. Grow some food and share it. Empowering gifts determine our wellbeing. They educate. They increase our options. They teach us how to take care of ourselves holistically, spiritually and with greater certainty physically.

Giving a gift of food helps shift our focus back to how hurriedly we need to tend to reciprocity with the rest of the natural world.

There's a graveyard of gifts dead on arrival

but gifts that feed the whole self every day,

fill courtyards where living moves beyond survival.