Passover starts tonight.  It’s the holiday where Jews and their families and friends share food to celebrate being rescued from oppression.  While that description pretty much fits the majority of Jewish holidays, Passover is special.  We read the story of the Exodus from Egypt, eat foods representative of the Exodus, share an enormous dinner, and drink a little too much wine. 

The ceremonial foods are deeply symbolic.  There are fresh spring greens -- I use watercress -- to represent renewal, freedom, and the arrival of spring and the new chances it brings.  There is salt water in which to dip those greens, representative of the tears our ancestors shed when they were slaves.  There is the charoset, which I make as a mixture of grated apples, cinnamon, ground walnuts, wine, and golden raisins, allowed to marinate together overnight.  It represents the morter we used in slavery while building the temples and cities of Egypt, but it is sweet to remind us that even in miserable times, there is sweetness.  There is the afikomen, the hidden piece of matzah the children must look for, so they always remember to look for hidden and unresolved solutions.  There are the scallions with which we beat each other senseless (it’s a Sephardic tradition! Fun!) There is an egg for renewal (we’re big on that), horseradish for bitterness (we’re into that too), wine drops to represent the Egyptians’ suffering during the Ten Plagues... Everything means something.

Celebrating Passover is about the imperative that we remember and never forget the slavery and subsequent freedom, and that we learn to apply it to modern contexts, to challenge oppression wherever we see it and to celebrate freedom. 

But there’s another message to take away from the idea of foods as symbols, beyond the specific meaning of each food itself. The message is simply that food can be symbolic, that there is meaning in what you eat, and in how you choose it and when you eat it.  A leaf of watercress holds a lesson.  Eggs eaten in springtime are significant.  An apple mixture is not always what it seems.  Food should be eaten with mindfulness.

This message can be applied to the idea of sustainable eating.  When we choose foods mindfully, it means considering what will be good for our bodies, for our friends and families, for the soil in the region we live, for the air. What will sustain us.  What is the right thing to eat at this time of year, the butter or meat benefiting from a spring flush of grass, the new plants emerging, the root vegetables saved over the winter.  When we eat with intention, we respect food and one another, and we shun the modern notion that food is something to eat without conscience, or consciousness, the fast food meal to grab at the drive-through window on our way somewhere else.

This isn’t to say that a Zen-style awareness of the food, or political awareness of how many miles it came from or whether it was raised sustainably, are the only important parts of food awareness.  Food awareness is also about sharing with other people, commenting on food together, making each other well through delicious food and good company.  A Passover seder would be useless with one person; with one there can be no shared awareness.  It is only through discussion and acknowledgment of meaning, through communal eating, and through the subconscious, unspoken warmth of sharing food together do we complete the cycle and understand the full meaning of our food and its many layers of symbolism.  Only then does a seder meal, or any meal, become participatory, fully engaged, and delicious.

Happy Passover to all who celebrate!  I’m busy preparing a seder for 25, with plenty of local, healthy foods and a few that, I admit, fit neither category perfectly (almond macaroons with, gasp, sugar).  More posts to come in the days ahead -- recipes, local foods, more science about fat soluble vitamins... 

thanks to Paurian for the Flickr CC photo