When you, when you don’t touch the food, you do not know what it is. If food is not good enough to be touched, I don’t know how it’s good enough to be eaten.
Dr. Mark: So we should not listen to our mothers, and eat with our fingers, because touching our food helps us stay in contact with it.
You can, the cleanliness of your hands, is entirely in your hands. The cleanliness of the fork, is not entirely in your hands.
Dr. Mark: This is true.
And, nobody else, but you, have used these hands. So, there is an assurance as to how clean or not clean it is right now. The fork, you do not know who’s used it, how they’ve used it, for what they used it. And, all they have to do is wipe it with a tissue and give it to you, and it looks pretty clean. Above all, you don’t feel the food.
The first thing that’s been taught to us is, if food appears in front of you, to hold your hands upon the food for a few moments
The first thing that’s been taught to us is, if food appears in front of you, to hold your hands upon the food for a few moments. Just to feel how the food is. If something appears on my plate, if I just feel this, I know what to eat and what not to eat. What I should not eat, I don’t taste it and then reject it. I just don’t eat. Because my hands are the first level, not tasting in the sense the tongue taste, but knowing the food. First thing is, knowing the food.
You want to know a person, you guys go and shake their hands. I’m usually avoiding that.
Dr. Mark: That’s a good strategy.
But the food that’s going to become a part of you, first thing is your hands. Even if you physically don’t touch it, just being conscious and being there, it clearly tells you how the food will behave within you. Whether this particular food, on this particular day, should it go into you or not. Because everyday your body is not the same thing. Everyday, every moment, it’s different. If you feel the food, you just know whether this food has to go into you on this day or not. If that much awareness is brought in, we don’t have to go on telling people, what they should eat. Every meal they must decide, what they should eat in that meal. There is no one prescription, that this is what you should eat for your life. That will feel too claustrophobic. That only this I can eat.
