What are you eating these days? When is the last time that you reflected on your gastronomic habits?

I am a vegetarian. Most of the time my experience as a vegetarian is a relatively joyous, earth-engaged culinary, ecological and spiritual practice. Therefore, I was delighted to see a recipe featuring tofu in yesterday’s New York Times food section. The headline read “Tofu Meets its Match in a Dish Fit for Carnivores.” I flipped to the page with expectation of a new recipe to add to my collection. To my astonishment, I found that the author, in attempting to make the tofu more flavorful added pork as the key ingredient. Pork?! Oh, my...

Must I conclude, then, that a “dish fit for carnivores” is one that excludes vegetarians and others?

This got me thinking about why I still consider vegetarianism a good choice for myself after more than a decade. As a culinary preference, being a vegetarian has made me a more disciplined eater. As a teenager (with a teen’s metabolism), I ate pretty much whatever. To paraphrase: when I was a child, I ate like a child. But now that I am an adult, I put away my old childish food ways. I like the thoughtfulness (did someone say mindfulness?) of a vegetarian lifestyle. More so, I like the politics of it.

Back in the day, reading Diet for a Small Planet by France Moore Lappé transformed my life and thinking about food. Lappé argues that hunger is not a food scarcity problem; hunger is a problem in the ways that food is produced and distributed. In order to be fattened up for markets, animals are fed with food that could be fed to hungry humans.

Enter vegetarianism as a spiritual practice for me. The Bible frequently notes hunger and poverty as pressing issues in Jesus’ ministry. Vegetarianism is an everyday response to hunger and poverty. Jewish people embody the spirituality of eating through kashrut (kosher) laws and Muslims, through observing Halal. Both are practices of prayer, food preparation and consumption. Common to all three practices (vegetarianism, kosher and Halal) is the absence of pork. Thus my distaste (pun intended) and disappointment with the NY Times recipe.

What do you think? Maybe you see no connection between what you eat and your spirituality. Maybe your mother was right: “you are what you eat.” What’s on your plate these days?