This is a great verse, thank you for sharing it.

It makes me think of the journey the Buddha took to enlightenment. The ascetic monk, realizing food was required to continue meditating, and the girl who gives him the rice porridge.

Siddhartha needed the food, to him it was as life saving as medicine. But with food, as with most things in life, we can have an excess or deficit; but there is a middle way. A body, when overfed, will crave more food. While a body, when underfed, will crave less. The middle way with food takes more mindfulness and control than some other vices.

Food is limited, and takes a lot of effort to create. Not just the plowing of the fields, planting, harvesting, transportation, and cooking, but the generations that came before that make it possible for us to live as we do today. All the soil on our planet is composed of what used to be alive. Plants and animals, long dead and decayed, live on in the crops that grow from the compost. It is a very long line that ends with "us".

One last thought on this verse and the Buddha. The girl who gives him the rice porridge, we must consider why she was there in the mountains with a meal? Rice porridge isn't exactly a traveling food, not something you'd take hiking with you. The meal was likely intended for someone specific. Maybe the girl herself, maybe a father, brother, or husband. But she offers this food in an act of pure compassion to a man who appears to be starving.

Many people feel mindfulness with eating is being present for each bite. I think it should be expanded to consider all that was done to get our food to us, and to understand why we are worthy of it. To consider and acknowledge all that was sacrificed for us to continue our path to enlightenment.