When we sit down for a meal (or grab and run, eat from our gym bag, sip a smoothie out the door), it is hard to tell whether we are consuming food or information. We have so many choices, and are bombarded by enough media that everything we eat has become "good" or "bad", when it should really just be "food". We want to connect to the experience of eating, not the just the information about what we're eating. This is meal-time mindfulness.
Since we are all beginners, we're trying a 1 minute meditation before each meal to quiet the external and respect the internal. Some pretty excellent advice about food comes from a Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn, who discussed the example of eating a carrot: "When you eat, don't put anything else into your mouth, like your projects, your worries, your fear, just put in the carrot." More often than not, we need to set aside external information, and let the body and mind connect to the experience. That is the root of mindfulness-it nourishes our life and work moment to moment.
