What Food Deserves: A Canticle

When our strength is spent,

There’s nothing like nourishment

To bring it back, back, back.

We go to the world again,

We eat a something, and then

We feel we’ve regained what we were.

Food can be a making of love

To the world we know.

We can go to and fro,

But we come back to food,

Waiting for us.

The idea of nourishment

Can seem prosaic, even dull;

But there is nothing less dull

Than once more to be full

Of appreciation for a physical world.

How materialistic

Is the adding of weight

To ourselves by the food we eat!

But there is something infinite to appreciate

As food becomes us.

This is fairly obvious.

The interchange of world and us

Is something truly glorious,

Though no bands are playing.

For the becoming life

By food in a state of repose

Is definitely great.

What is a greater thing to appreciate

Than the changing of food into temperament,

The changing of food into memory?—

Including memory that pains.

Hail, food, that which revives

The spirit we care for but which may droop.

Let us, then, properly

Utter a sigh

And a whoop

Heard over the world.

The becoming of the animate

Through the welcoming of the inanimate

Is a great transformation.

So in a state of seemly elation,

We hail food;

And we hope that we have a just attitude

To our great friend, food,

Though seen wrongly, it can upset.

Food, though, deserves to be seen rightly,

Ever increasingly.

And if that goes on,

The unease that many feel about food

Will have gone.

Food will be seen as grace itself.