The passage of a vegetarian meal from sprout to tabletop is a long, complicated story. At the Buddhist community Upaya, food's journey from delivery truck to the plate is itself a long chapter in this endless business of eating. It is a journey of interdependent moving cycles: The food has its own seasonal growing cycles; humans have their daily eating cycles, and the ordering and preparing of the food brings it all together in the simple activity of opening our mouths and putting in the food. It's almost too detailed to imagine. Our kitchen team uses skillful means to manage, i.e., guesswork, experience, a feel for impermanence, and tolerance for occasional burns and cuts.

This above and below is from a newsletter from Upaya in Santa Fe and brings to light a Zen perspective on cooking that I am mindful of, particularly this week when I am savoring and cooking recipes from the cookbook "Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen." Madison also lives in the Santa Fe area. Here is how Upaya describes the process of food preparation at their Zendo.

Produce Manager Joko and Pantry Manager Myokei, our new kitchen "Mamma," somehow figure out how to order huge quantities of food and dry goods that get delivered once or twice a week based on menus drawn up the week before by the team of cooks. They have to estimate how long it will last and how much to get next time, according to ever changing numbers of residents and visitors. And there are the mini shopping trips for the special or last-minute items - raspberries for Rose's Swiss Muesli, the weird organic canned pumpkin, lemon grass, or the very rare purchase of ice cream, usually for someone's birthday.

In an organic, vegetarian kitchen, there is lots of vegetable prep. Out come the cutting boards, the knives and the huge stainless steel bowls for washing, for peels, for the diced beets, the kale, the marinating tofu. The knives have their own cycle that is strictly between them and the sharpener, who is never called by any human. He just shows up, several times a year to everyone's nervous joy. How great and scary to work with these very discerning tools that demand respect and lots of band-aids.

Once the chopping, slicing, cubing is done, cooking starts. Every day the moody, three-legged oven lights up to steam, boil, bake and saute countless ingredients. Master Chef Sandra McDonald, who cooks when we have very large groups, manages to have all five burners and the oven going at once. It is impossible to predict what she is doing, but without fail, she produces glorious feasts for up to 100 people. Our resident cooks bring their own style and background to their work. Samar, one of our new cooks, brings Lebanese lusciousness. Myokei cooks a clean, essentialist Japanese style. Rose represents Euro-elegance with a Swiss twist. And Joko does Marin County free-styling. John, the newest of all, served his first meal on Saturday night to everyone's applause! His style is promisingly undetermined as of yet.

Zen Master Dogen instructs the Tenzo, the zendo's cook: "Keep your eyes open. Do not allow even one grain of rice to be lost. Wash the rice thoroughly, put it in the pot, light the fire, and cook it. There is an old saying that goes, "See the pot as your own head: see the water as your lifeblood."

And then, at the end of the newsletter comes this aching note:

"I am an indigent inmate in a California institution. ... I came across your organization's address scratched into the bunk of my cell. I'm taking a shot, a kind of long shot, it may seem ... but the word 'Zen' sounds like something calm and soothing. I don't have a dictionary, or any kind of reading materials for that matter, but Zen reminds me of something calm. You would wonder why a man would want to write a place that was scratched on a piece of metal ... but I guess it would be for the same reason a person would call a number written on a restroom stall ... loneliness."

From vegetarian mindfulness to a prisoner in a cell hungering for a better life, a spiritual cup of cold water, we all are starved for a healthy community. "Volunteers in the Upaya Prison Outreach Project offer weekly mindfulness instruction classes in three correctional facilities: Santa Fe County Adult Detention Facility (both state and county inmates), Santa Fe County Youth Development Facility, and Central New Mexico Correctional Facility. In addition, one of our workers visits the prisons at Hobbs and Roswell, N.M. The classes consist of instruction in meditation, yoga, and conversation from the heart leading to problem solving. Studies have shown that this training reduces violent behavior among inmates as well as between inmates and corrections staff, preparing the residents to re-enter society without relapsing into addiction and violence. Through this training we expect to see a reduction in prison entry recidivism. Persons interested in working 'inside' with prison residents are warmly welcomed."

Preparing a table for all our longings to be fed is work we can all do — from the kitchen to the prison cell.

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Lynne Bundesen is the author of five books addressing religious issues including "So the Woman Went Her Way," "One Prayer at a Time" (Simon and Schuster) and "The Feminine Spirit: Recapturing the Heart of Scripture" (March 2007: Jossey Bassey). Her email address is {email lynnebundesen@hotmail.com}lynnebundesen@hotmail.com{/email}. © Copyright 2008 Lynne Bundesen.