The focus on good nutriments comes from Recognition that one creates suffering. Recognition is the first step on the path towards realizing the nature and interbeing of suffering. We must know how we create and perpetuate our causes of suffering. Of the four nutriments, the first is edible food and drink. The Buddha says that “many people eat the flesh of their parents, their children, and their grandchildren and do not know it” (32). The Buddha means that the way we treat and feed our own bodies will affect the well-being of others, for instance the Buddha would say eating poor nutriments is like eating the flesh of my parents because in damaging my health, I would cause my parents to suffer. Likewise, taking in drugs and excessive alcohol will damage my organs and this would be equivalent to eating them.

Eating food that is not grown with regard to minimizing the impact on the environment is like eating the flesh of other people because we will make it more difficult for future generations to get food. This resonates with the movement towards organic and locally grown products, which are meant to be more sustainable so that natural resources are not depleted. The extra cost of organic or locally grown foods may be acceptable to people who wish to eat right nutriments and not eat the flesh of others.

The second kind of nutriment is the input we get from our senses, and Hanh mentions examples such as the news, advertisements, TV shows, books and other forms of media and he refers to them as “food for our eyes” (33). [Contact with toxic sensory nutriments will make one feel like they are anxious or exhausted.]

Interestingly, the third nutriment is our volition. Unlike the first two, this nutriment arises within us and is not something we take in. Having right volition requires a mindfulness of what makes us truly and this should be something that is always available, such as the beauty found in nature. In this way, what feeds our volition will always be available to us. Buddha turned to his followers after the farmer lost his livestock and crops and said that they were the happiest men alive because they “have no cows or sesame plants to lose” (35). By removing material goods as a contingency for happiness, unavoidable loss will not devastate the monks’ outlook on life. Hanh also cautions us about the directions our habits drive us towards and to root out the reasons we may drive ourselves towards destructive behavior.

The fourth nutriment is consciousness and the kind of “seeds” that we allow to cultivate in our consciousness. For instance, Buddhist psychology believes that there are seeds of any kind of emotion or state including happiness, sorrow, and even the Buddha itself (12). We nourish our consciousness by cultivating the good and bad kinds of potential we all possess and our lives become a reflection of our consciousness.

How do you avoid these seemingly ubiquitous toxins? Perhaps strictly avoiding toxins is the wrong strategy. Like the path to Right Thinking, it is often impossible to completely block out bad thoughts and instead the Buddha suggested to “change the peg” (62). This means that we convert a bad thought into a positive one. I could be upset about how stressful college seems sometimes, or I could choose to be thankful that stress is my biggest problem as opposed to food insecurity. Changing the peg is actually a good strategy for feeding your consciousness because you are choosing to water the good seeds instead of the bad.

Since our environment is inundated with bad nutriments in the form of unhealthy food and media messages that give us cravings or give us anxiety, it is better to exercise a changing the peg strategy with nutriments as well. However, it is sometimes confusing trying to figure out what nutriments are bad. For example, there are people who think a diet high in carbohydrates and low in fat is the right way to eat, while others shun carbs as much as possible and eat a high fat diet. How do you know which is best for you? According to Hanh, mindfulness and awareness of how things make you feel will be a guide to identifying what is good and what is bad. We can recall that one part of Right Mindfulness is being aware of “feelings in the feelings” (71). This is done by accepting any feeling we feel and let it leave just as easily, thereby allowing us to closely examine how a nutriment makes us feel after we have ingested it and then we can decide whether it is good for us or not.

Another component, I believe, is mindful eating itself. Too often when I am eating, I am surprised that my food has suddenly disappeared. Where did my chicken quesadilla go?? Did I even taste it? What was I thinking about instead of eating? Without being able to taste and savor your food, it is very difficult to mindfully evaluate how eating the food makes you feel. I also find that I eat a lot less when I take the time to taste my food, I can reflect on whether this food is really healthy for me, or if I just grabbed what I could find.  After you eat something consciously, you can accurately reflect on how it makes your body feel.

One issue that will prove difficult is eating food that is “clean” as in food that is produced conscientiously, lacking pesticides, antibiotics, and strange additives that even the brightest of chemistry majors have trouble pronouncing. Again, completely avoiding bad foods may be unrealistic. But in terms of changing the peg, we can make a small change to our diets and swap out a few bad choices with better ones. I try to buy organic vegetables at least twice a month, because organic food is expensive and honestly I don’t think it has the magical taste that people claim it does. But if I’m mindful of where that food came from, I can at least be happy that I am not “eating the flesh of my children” as the Buddha might say. Another example in my life is my attempt to give up coffee because I would depend on it too much to stay awake and instead I would switch out coffee for tea. There is still a bit of caffeine in it, but I still get my warm beverage to savor in the morning. (However, I have started drinking coffee again for finals week…QQ).

Hanh suggests that given the scale of news media and its negativity, collective mindfulness on the part of everyone to avoid the problem of bad nutriments in media (34). What does that mean, and how can you, a single person, affect this collective mindfulness and encourage everyone to stop supporting news that perpetuates anxiety? Getting everyone to agree on what good media should be will probably prove impossible and I don’t think swearing off television is a good first step. Instead, let’s ask ourselves a couple questions. Why is it that more people watch news that adds to their anxiety instead of news of hope and innovation? Why is it that so many movies are about dystopia (like my guilty pleasure, Hunger Games) instead of utopia? Do we really gain anything when we ruminate on negativity? No, we don’t. So perhaps the real problem with media is how most of us as viewers are willing to chew the anxiety cud instead of spitting it out. Now again, we can’t start out by swearing off all negativity or self-perpetuating anxiety, but we can use the Buddha’s powerful changing of the peg technique to improve our positivity. My technique for improving my own positivity is fairly simple: at the end of the day, I take a minute to write down one, just one, positive thing that happened during the day and post it on my door. After a couple of months, my door was covered with positive moments that I could read over before heading out and starting my day. And as I became more positive, I realized that I didn’t tolerate most negative news anymore: I couldn’t find a reason to keep chewing on the cud and being inundated with negativity again and again. And I can still learn about the world by reading newspaper articles on the internet, without having to see inflammatory footage of people being killed in wars or disasters. And unlike most news programs, I can focus on new advancements in science or medicine and choose which articles I want to read further instead of having something negative projected into my home.

By taking a few small steps each day, we can alter our consciousness and cultivate only the qualities that we want to by making small changes to our daily lives to limit our intake of bad nutriments. By applying the principle of changing the peg to our lives, we can take in more good nutriments and leave out more bad nutriments in a practical manner. Even a slight change will be noticeable. And if everyone makes a slight change, we will be able to cultivate a collective mindfulness and inspire a little bit of kindness in each other.

Works cited:

Hanh, T.N. 1999. The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching.