Love – the most nutritious ingredient

Out of all things that make life healthy and livable, the most important thing is food. Nutritious food – food with appropriate content of vitamins and minerals - helps live long and healthy life. The strength that one achieves through nutritious food helps perform duties with high and complex responsibilities. Intake of nutritious food at regular intervals goes long way in maintaining high energy level that helps to face all challenges in life.
 
After nutritious food the second most important thing is the desire to offer and partake nutritious food. One may have the most nutritious food in the world, but if one does not have desire to eat that food, what’s the use?
 
That’s where comes the importance of the most nutritious ingredient of the food – love - that helps develop desire to prepare and partake nutritious food. Even the simplest food can become rich in nutrition when prepared and partaken with love. This ingredient – love - enters the food when one remembers the original provider of the food and ultimate consumer of the food.
 
They say that to bring this ingredient of love in the food, first offer food to the ultimate consumer – paramabhokta – of the food, i.e. God and then partake the food. The process of thus remembering God transforms the food into prasad. It is a belief, and there are numerous stories in scriptures that support this belief, that prasad never runs short. Nobody in the surrounding can remain hungry when the food is partaken as prasad.
 

They say that the food should be partaken in happy mood. It is better to avoid insistence for eating excessive quantity food. Such insistence can lead to displeasure and loss of fun of eating. Ananda, happiness, is the real form of God. Food brings ananda and ananda brings food. There can never be scarcity of the food in the house where food is partaken in happy mood. Getting all family members together, praying and thanking God for food before partaking food and then partaking food in happy mood goes long way in keeping family together, happy and healthy.