I knew a woman once, who refused to eat any meat that *looked* like the animal it once was. Whole fish, whole roasted duck… you get the idea.

It was as if by denying that the thing was once alive, she could alleviate her guilt that something, anything, had to die to provide the calories she needed to live. It was odd logic, but there is so much guilt today around food of all kinds, maybe it makes sense to want to bury your head in the sand for a bit.

Given the considerable amount of angst around food these days, I thought I’d present this food for thought: maybe the key to feeling good about food again, is to go beyond the label. Maybe what makes us less crazy about food is, in fact, to think about food more, and not less.

Umbra Fisk has written a great short piece about sustainable sushi in this month’s Whole Life Times. In a world where 30% of our fisheries are being over-fished or fished unsustainably and a number of species are headed for extinction, how do we feel good about sushi? By knowing more, says Fisk. The more we are involved with our food–the more we know and understand about what it is and where it comes from and why–the more at peace we can feel about the things we choose to eat and not eat.

USC sociologist Barry Glassner has also recently come out with a book about the gospel of food, titled, haha! The Gospel of Food. In his meticulously researched book, he argues that we have disassociated ourselves from our food, built up emotional walls around it, and in the process lost some of the things that are really great about food–namely our ability to really savor the experience of eating it.

Irradiated, organic, meatless, hormone-free, genetically modified… Our choices about eating may be based in our politics, our beliefs about the environment, our spirituality, or our concerns about our health. And then there is taste, preference, pleasure, and the way in which food bonds us together with others. In the end, I think we also believe that what we put in our mouths says something about us.

We are what we eat.