It is not hard to see where magick and food intersect. Most modern Pagan traditions hold that the planet we live on deserves reverence. “Earth-based spirituality” or “Nature religion” are common euphemisms for various forms of Paganism. Almost all magickal systems honour the elements as sacred participants and invited guests. Air, Fire, Water, and Earth are frequently invoked at Pagan rituals. Everything we eat comes from the earth. Yes! That includes organic vegetables, ethically raised meats, and manufactured foods with additives and chemicals with a list of unpronounceable ingredients as long as your arm. We live here on the earth. The food we eat lives, grows, or is made here too.
Food is transformed by the elements. Fire in all its myriad forms heats our food. Water washes clean our vegetables, boils stew, and turns leaves into tea. Convection ovens employ Air and help foods cook faster. And Earth, well, that’s everywhere. Clay dishes, metal pans, the soil our foods grow in. There’s no part of what we eat that isn’t impacted by the elements.
A basic understanding of the magickal arts reveals that we aim to work in accord with the natural world, stepping into the flow of the landscapes we find ourselves in. The phrase “changing consciousness at will” is frequently applied to all sorts of magickal practices. One of the best ways to change your consciousness and be in touch with the natural world is to be aware of the food you eat. Food has the incredible power to change our mood, impact our energy levels (both physically and metaphysically), and bring us in alignment with the natural forces present in our environment.
Working with food as a magickal practice doesn’t require much more than you already have right now. It’s possible your refrigerator, freezer, pantry, and spice cabinet are completely stocked to bursting with every imaginable protein, meat, and vegetable you might need, or you might be in possession of one lone mushroom, a box of leftover rice from lunch at Panda Express, and an egg. What you have, what you can afford to buy, and where you are able to buy or grow the foods you eat has little to do with the magick you can create with the food you have.
Each magickal system has its guidelines, rules, and methods. It’s no different with food magick. I’ve concluded that there are five basic principles to understand. Every time you shop for ingredients or sit in your car in a drive-through line or eat popcorn at a movie, you can remember these guidelines and put magickal intentions to work for you.
1. All food is sacred.
2. Eat what you need.
3. Share what you can.
4. Express gratitude.
5. Pass the knowledge along.
All food is sacred. It is. Sit with that for a minute and let that fact settle in. Notice I didn’t say “All food is healthy” or “All food should be organic” or “All food is sacred only when it comes from a farmer’s market, is locally produced, is cruelty free, and is lovingly prepared by a personal chef named Jacques in sacred space.” A McDonald’s cheeseburger is sacred. So are potato chips and skinny vanilla lattes. Microwaveable pizza is a gift from the gods, and bags of plain white rice and red beans purchased at the discount grocery store are quite possibly more sacred than the Great Pyramid of Cheops, Stonehenge, and the Charge of the Goddess all combined.
Don’t get me wrong—eat well, eat healthy foods, do whatever you can to support local farmers and food artisans, and do grow your own food if you have the resources to. But having access to “clean” and “sustainable” foodstuffs doesn’t make them any more sacred than prepackaged foods from the megastore. What it does mean is that you are fortunate enough to be able to make choices about what you buy, grow, and eat, and that’s a truly amazing state of affairs. Absolutely revel in and appreciate your good fortune.
For many people, regular access to fresh fruits and vegetables, free-range meat, and organic spices just isn’t a reality. There are areas in the United States known as food deserts, whole neighbourhoods, hundreds of square blocks without grocery stores. You couldn’t find a bunch of basil if you searched for a month, but you could find every candy bar and fast food restaurant you can name. People must eat. I would love for there to be food equity and justice and access for every single person in the world, and I’ll never judge anyone for their food choices when I have more choices than they.
Let me give you an example from my own childhood. Milk sop. I thought milk sop was the best breakfast treat in the world. My mother would make milk sop a couple of times a month and I thought I was the luckiest kid around when I woke up to find a steaming bowl of it waiting for me. Milk sop is bread, sugar and hot milk. Mmm … right?
What I didn’t know was that I got milk sop when there was nothing else to eat. The bread was the hard heels of a leftover loaf, ripped up into cubes. The milk was the last inch or two in the container and sugar was to sprinkle liberally over the top so it was sweet and I’d eat it. Milk sop is one of the most sacred and dear meals I can ever eat because it’s the meal I ate when we had absolutely nothing else in the house. Eating milk sop meant my mother probably didn’t eat that day. Milk and bread and sugar remind me what it is to feed another person the very last morsel you have and that the most meagre ingredients, lovingly prepared, can sustain life and bring joy. And if sustaining life isn’t potent magick, then I don’t know what is.
Eating what you need speaks to paying attention to internal conversations and the wisdom of our own bodies. These are big questions being raised here. “What do I need to eat?” and “Why do I need to eat it?” The answers are incredibly complex, as they have to do with hormone levels, chemical processes in the brain, mineral deficiencies and excesses, emotions associated with lack and surplus, our childhood, outside stimulation (like advertisements), societal expectations, and taboos. This list could go on and on.
Let’s look at this from the perspective of magick. It’s a well-held magickal belief that there are forces at work beyond our human understanding. Perhaps that means goddesses and the Good Folk to you. Maybe those forces have to do with the alignment of the planets and stars, or the way that the mycelial network communicates over vast distances. No matter how you define those forces, part of being a magick worker is to pay attention and act accordingly to the messages you receive or interpret from those forces. The highly complex system that is your body is like one of those forces. It sends you messages, even if they are highly encrypted, almost indecipherable, and practically alien in their origins, even though those origins might be right there in your liver, your taste buds, or your hypothalamus gland. The key is that it’s not always going to be clear why you are being called to act a certain way, but rather you should try to hear the message, imagine what it might mean to you in this moment, and then act with awareness and purpose.
And that’s why it’s perfectly magickal to exclaim to the universe, “I need to eat a pretzel right now!” Maybe you just really want a pretzel because the people that own the pretzel stand are nefariously pumping out delicious pretzel smells in hopes of enticing you to buy a pretzel. Maybe your body needs salt right this minute and says, “Hey! Isn’t there a pretzel stand around here somewhere?” Align with the magick and act consciously. Buy the pretzel. Eat it. Enjoy it. Or note that you really want something salty right in this moment and decide that a pretzel isn’t the optimal choice for you and go get a bowl of miso soup instead.
The forces you are reacting to have a message. You might interpret that message as the need for a specific kind of food or to get certain ingredients, minerals, or vitamins into your system. Beyond that, maybe pretzels remind you of where you grew up or a person you love and adore that’s no longer part of your life. The forces at work might want you to eat a pretzel because somewhere in the recesses of your mind you know that it’s nearly the anniversary of your favourite aunt Elsie’s passing, even though you haven’t thought about her in years. Go with the magick. Eat the foods that you are attracted to, that are calling you for some unknown reason, and see if you can find the reason.
Human beings have been sharing food with each other for hundreds of thousands of years, millions even. Perhaps you shared the milk from your own body with another person or you were fed by mother’s milk. You would not be reading this book today if someone hadn’t shared food with you. A study of college-aged students published in the journal Appetite showed that people that shared their food with others were also more likely to give up their seat on public transport, help a friend move, act with more consideration to others, listen better, and exhibit “prosocial” tendencies.25
Interestingly enough, there’s an echo of wisdom from our ancient Sumerian friends in that the students noted a marked difference between simply “eating together” and “sharing a meal.” I define “eating together” as dining with another person. We do that all the time. We find ourselves at a restaurant with someone. We typically order separate meals, and likely we pay for “our” meal. What’s on my plate is mine and what’s on your plate is yours. Sharing a meal, however, means that we share food with each other. We eat from one pot, we pick foods from a communal platter that we’ve all contributed to, even eat from one another’s plates. There’s a real difference in how we conduct ourselves when we’re consciously sharing with another person or group.
Again, let’s look at this magickally for a moment. One of the main benefits of practicing in a coven or any form of magickal group that works together regularly is the sense of a common bond and common purpose. Feelings of sympathy, empathy, genuine concern, even love are present when the group gathers. There’s an egregore, a shared consciousness, that begins to impact the group on subtle, magickal levels. These feelings don’t happen in a vacuum though; they need to be cultivated. Preparing and sharing meals together is one way to stimulate the process of bonding. Sharing food together requires trust, restraint, paying attention to who has eaten and who has not, so you know when it’s okay to fill your plate again. If you learn that a new coven member doesn’t eat tomatoes, you might consider bringing a wider variety of fruits and vegetables to your next meeting. That shows care and attention and that a person’s food needs are important. Egregore grows.
What if you are a solitary practitioner? Share your meals anyway, as often as you can, with the non-magickal people in your life. Let me tell you a short story of a birthday dinner I once had at a local restaurant as an example. My partner and I were seated next to a married couple. We could hear them discussing their menu choices. We settled on our choices. All the appetizers showed up about the same time. I looked over and commented on “his” dish. I’d considered it but opted for something else. Turns out, he was mulling over what to get and was stuck between ordering what he did and what I’d ordered. I asked if he wanted a bite or two of my meal. His wife was initially appalled at the suggestion, but he was totally game. He offered me a forkful of his appetizer. We exchanged names. We discussed food. Talked about where we lived. We discovered that we shared the same birthday and that our partners were treating us to a special meal. We pulled our tables together and ended up eating our meals “family style,” sharing everything that came up. We even split the bill when we were done. It is one of the best birthday meals I’ve ever had, and it was with two total strangers.
Maybe eating a meal with someone you don’t know is a little too far for you to go just now. Maybe you could organize a potluck at work. Bake a cake and share it with your neighbour. Share your gummy bears with a stranger you meet on the bus. What does this have to do with your magickal practices? Sharing food means you must interact with others in real life, even if that’s awkward. It means navigating personal food preferences, letting go of having all the control, and learning from and about others. Lastly, and most importantly, sharing what you can with others connects you with folks on a very human level. I can share my food with you and know that at the present moment in time, you are not hungry or thirsty. You may hold wildly different beliefs than I do, or not be the kind of person I would choose to hang out with in the future, but we can share food together and celebrate the fact that we both have something to eat. Magick is often cited as being about power. I can think of no greater use of magickal power than ensuring the health and happiness of one other human being, albeit temporarily, by making sure they are fed.
A simple “thank you” goes a long way. There’s a spell called “the The Thermos of Gratitude” included in the recipe section of this book. It speaks in detail about the practice of gratitude. Expressing thanks, being grateful for what others have provided for us, is a profoundly satisfying practice, but what does it have to do with magick? Well, a lot actually.
Very few magicks left in the world are done entirely alone. Even if we practice by ourselves, we’re probably reading books written about the magick other people have done and repeating those spells, incantations, and rituals. If you work within a particular magickal tradition, unless you started that tradition yourself, there’s a good chance there are elders and founders and folk that have shown you the magickal ropes. It’s a fair bet that almost every part of your magickal practice owes something to someone else. If the magick you do means a great deal to you, your family, your coven, and the tradition you practice in, recognizing that fact and saying “thank you” once in a while is a simple and elegant way to remember those that have contributed to your life and impacted your well-being in a positive way. One of the easiest ways to express gratitude is to say “thank you” at every meal. Maybe you’re thanking the person that cooked your meal, or served your meal, or perhaps you’re saying the “big thank you” to the goddess in your chosen pantheon, your ancestors, or the planet you live on.
There’s a phrase I heard at a large gathering of witches. As the spell work was drawing to an end for the evening, the cry of “the magick must move” began echoing around the stone circle where the ritual was happening. I understood that chant to mean that we must move our magick out of the cauldron, so to speak, and take it out into the world. We do that when we pass our magick along, sharing our skills and knowledge with others, writing down spells and recipes and the best cooking techniques. There is a power in freeing the magick and letting the intention of a spell go where it must to do its best work.
It’s the same with food magick. The collecting of ingredients and the alchemy of cooking a meal, coupled with the magickal workings embedded into each herb and vegetable, are temporary vehicles for the magick being created. There is no ever-filling cauldron where ingredients replenish themselves whenever there’s a need for more food. As much as I wish it were true, the magick of a full harvest table only lasts in that form for a few brief hours until the food is eaten and transformed into calories.
The magick must move, and move it does. The food moves through our physical bodies and, at some point, we literally pass it on. But there’s a magickal way in which we’re passing it along too. Food replenishes us; it nourishes us and those we share our food with. If eating together or providing food for others is a regular part of your magick, you are passing your magick along through the actions and thoughts of everyone that eats your food. If there’s spell work kneaded into every loaf you bake, if each spice and herb is chosen for its magickal properties as well as its flavour profile, if gratitude is expressed for the life of the animal that died to be reborn in another form on your dining room table, then when your oven has cooled and the dishes are done and folks leave to go about their business, the magick will move with them. It must. The ones you feed carry the spells out with them into everything they do. That’s powerful magick indeed.
Food has the magickal ability to anchor specific moments in our minds and in our bodies, perhaps like no other magickal tool can.
Try this magickal exercise right now. Get comfortable. Close your eyes. Exchange a few deep breaths with the world around you. Feel your lungs expanding with each inhale. Imagine the air traveling down into your belly. As you breathe, cast your mind back to a favourite meal. Maybe the best meal you ever had. Was it a family gathering or an after-ritual feast with your coven? Perhaps your best meal happened in an exotic location or a world-class restaurant. Picture yourself back there. What do you remember about the food? Is there one particular dish that comes to mind? Is it served hot or cold? Are you imagining a specific bowl? Is the meal resting on a table or spread out on a blanket? Picture yourself putting the food in your mouth. What are those first tastes like? As you recall this delicious meal, look around you. Where are you? Who is there with you? What time of day or year is it? How many details can you recall? Spend some time here reconnecting with that moment, the food, and the people you shared this meal with. Notice if your body has relaxed. Is your mouth filling with saliva? Are you smiling, just thinking about this special time?
What would it be like if every meal, or at least a greater number of the meals you eat, were as memorable as this meal? What made this meal so very different? One magickal ingredient might be time.
A Little Bit of Time Magick
Thomas Moore, the former monk turned author and lecturer, published a book in the late 1990s titled The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life. A substantial part of my magickal practice has been directly influenced by this excellent book. A well-thumbed and dog-eared copy occupies a prime spot on my bookshelves and I often find that I’m leafing through it to reacquaint myself with a particular passage on this or that. The major premise of the book is that far too many people have become disenchanted with their own lives. Moore goes on to say that living a life devoid of wonder and connection slowly robs us of our humanity, fosters a sense of “aloneness,” and leaves the soul desperately searching for more of an ineffable something that seems impossible to define, let alone attain.
Now, re-enchanting a whole life seems like a lot of work. Worthwhile work, to be sure, but a daunting task nonetheless. I like to take on my enchantments in bite-sized pieces. Let’s start by examining our relationship to time in relation to food. Because no matter what we might choose to do with our time or what choices are made for us about how we should spend our time, time is the only thing we really have.
Try this ten-minute magickal exercise. Arrange your world so that you can be undisturbed for ten minutes. Grab a piece of paper and something to write with. Get comfortable. Rewind your life to yesterday, whenever your day started. What was the first thing you ate or drank? What were the next things? Recall everything you ate and drank yesterday. Write down each meal. Then go back to the first entry and detail where you were. Were you sitting in a vehicle? On a sunlit veranda? At your kitchen table? Repeat this as you move along yesterday’s timeline. Go back to your list a third time and note what you were thinking about when you were cooking or buying the food you ate. Can you remember any details about each meal? Was it sunny or cold? What tastes stand out to you? Who were you with and what were you talking about or doing?
If it hasn’t been ten minutes yet, just stay there with yesterday and the food and the memories. Take the full ten minutes.
To be clear, it doesn’t really matter what you ate. If it was organic beets harvested from your own garden, potato chips purchased from a local convenience store, or half a gallon of coffee hurriedly polished off before the rest of your household woke up, that’s just fine and dandy. This is not about judging yourself for the food choices you made. It’s about time. How did you spend time with food and yourself?
There’s a particular enchantment in slowing down time and eating purposely. One of the first lessons many magick workers discover is the art of being present. You may know this as grounding, centering, mindfulness, the ability to draw in one’s breath and be here now. Almost every magickal system, in fact virtually every spiritual tradition, has a practice of intentionally paying attention and participating, being acutely aware of what’s happening in this specific moment. The practice of becoming present, aware of the moment, is often ritualized at the beginning of spell work, public magickal events, or coven gatherings. Maybe you’ve been asked to take a breath, turn off your electronic devices, shower, wear certain clothes, disrobe, or hold hands in a circle and acknowledge the presence of the other human beings you are convening with. All of these methods are designed to bring you, or you and the group, or you and the magick you are creating, into accord with one another, thereby making the connection to the magick that much more potent, powerful, and personal. Apply the practice of becoming present when you next eat or cook. You may find that an interesting thing happens when you slow down and become mindful of your interactions with food. You’ll appreciate what you’re eating and, maybe more importantly, the food will taste better.
Do you have a favourite beverage, something that you can drink pretty often, maybe even on a regular basis? That simple glass or cup of liquid is going to make you a better witch and spell worker. I enjoy a cup of tea, so I’ll use my love of tea as an example. I like tea in the morning and in the afternoon. English tea, Irish tea, tea from Ceylon, green tea, jasmine tea … pretty much any collection of leaves and water and I’m good to go. My cousin, who still lives in England, asked me once how I made my tea. “Do you just put a tea bag in a cup or do you still make it properly?”
I told her I still made it properly. She went on, “Properly, like with loose leaves in a teapot or with tea bags?” Now, if the truth is to be told, I do sometimes pop a PG Tips tea bag into a cup, pour water over it, and call that a cuppa. But more often than not, I prefer to use my trusty old brown Betty teapot. There’s something magickal that happens when I do.
The first step is to grab the teapot. I wipe it down if it’s dusty and look inside to make sure it’s clean. I swish hot water around the inside of the teapot to warm it, just like my grandmothers taught me to do. Water gets boiled and a couple of heaping teaspoons of tea are added to the teapot. There’s that magick moment when water and tea leaves meet and swirl together as the tea begins to steep. While the tea is brewing, I find a cup or mug that draws my attention. There are probably forty cups in my house. Some were gifted to me by friends or family members as mementos of a trip they’d been on. Others have been collected at thrift stores because I thought they were neat, or cool, or odd, or pretty, or attention grabbing in some way. My cups reflect my mood, and I’m convinced they affect the taste of the tea. There are dainty, flowery cups, pretty as a Victorian garden, and hefty, handcrafted mugs that beg to be held close to my heart, warming my insides and my outsides at the same time.
Once I’ve selected the perfect vessel, I take the teapot and cup over to the kitchen table and I pour the tea. Frequently someone will join me. It might be a person. It might be the cat or one of the dogs, but I don’t tend to drink the tea alone. And it tastes better the longer I savour it. And conversation happens. (Yes, I talk to the dogs. The cat mostly ignores me.) And that conversation usually turns into a second cup of tea. The second cup of tea has even been known to turn into a second pot of tea. These few minutes of letting loose leaves and ideas brew becomes a spell of re-enchantment. Making an afternoon cuppa becomes a magickal moment of connection, a gift to myself.
Your version of this ritual might feature sipping tea in a tall glass while sitting in your backyard or milking your goat and enjoying fresh milk every morning. Heck! A beer on a Friday night, drunk straight from the bottle as you take time to reflect on the week you had works just fine too. The idea is to create space and contemplate your life. What’s your life’s work? Have you seen the vision of the magick you want to manifest? Let inspiration well up from those hidden recesses of your being that rarely get listened to because they’re drowned out with louder thoughts. This simple ritual may let worries and stresses fall away and open your magickal practices up to something wonderful. Creating time for a simple drinking ritual adds a splash of re-enchantment to the mundane.
The following is a process for creating magick with any restaurant experience. Some of these suggestions might be difficult, but I promise with these magickal workings, eating in restaurants will never be the same.
Decide where and when you are going to eat. Go to the restaurant alone and then step into the process. In order for the magick to work, you have to give up three things and then do three things during the meal. First, give these up:
1. Judgement. Easy-peasy, right? Arrive at the restaurant and begin letting go of your judgements. This might be your own inner conversations about your food choice, about spoiling yourself by spending money on a meal, or any number of other things. Let that go. You deserve this meal, wherever you find yourself. Imagine leaving your judgements in a paper bag right outside the front door. If you want my advice, right after you drop your concerns and interior conversations into your judgement bag, purposely forget to pick that sack of judgements back up again when you leave.
2. Expectations. Try it, you’ll like it! You might order the big bowl of clam chowder every time you go to Jes’s Chowder Shack. Maybe sitting in the booth near the back is what you always do. That diner on Trinity Street could be a place you only go with certain friends or for a special occasion. Let that all go. Give it up. You are not there with friends today, it’s not your wedding anniversary, and ordering what you order every other time is not a menu option today. In fact, you’re not going to order the food at all.
3. Decision making. This is a doozy. It’s a challenge for sure, and it’s just possible that you’ll read the next guidelines and exclaim “Forget that nonsense!” You are going to intentionally and consciously hand over the decision-making process to someone else. The person at the counter, your waitstaff, or the cook is in charge of your entire dining experience. Choosing what we want to eat is a big deal and giving up that choice is likely to dredge up all sorts of fears about scarcity, not liking particular foods, and giving your power away. This magickal working, to be successful, requires you to sacrifice a little. Here’s how it works. Look over the menu. Be sure to note if there are foods you cannot eat for health reasons, like if you have an allergy to shellfish, for instance. Look over the menu and discount only the foods you cannot eat, as opposed to the dishes you wouldn’t ordinarily eat. Now the menu is wide open and you’re about to let someone else order your food.
Now here are the three things you must do:
1. Engage in personal contact. You must make eye contact with the waitperson when they are at your table, and you must refer to them by name. Most chain restaurants give their staff name tags, so this is simple enough. In other restaurants you might have to pluck up the courage and ask them for their name. It’s okay. This could bring up some awkwardness for you, but I promise you’ll survive if you do this. I’ll explain why this step is so important later, but for now, just trust that this is an important piece of the magick.
2. Ask for recommendations. I find this part the most exciting and I know a fair few people who are mortified by the prospect of what I’m about to propose. This is a big step; are you ready? Ask your server what their favourite dishes are on the menu. I usually start the conversation with something like this: “Hey Andy, what do you love to eat here?” If they say, “I love the French onion soup. It’s the best in town,” you respond with, “Great! I’ll have that. What would you suggest after that?” To make it easier on them, I might let them know that I have a total of $50 to spend on this meal (or $20 or $100, or whatever your budget is). To help them hone in on the perfect meal for me, I might comment that I’m super excited to try anything on the menu, as long as it doesn’t contain peanuts. Other than that, they get to completely surprise me by bringing me only what they love to eat. I take the extra step of assuring them that they can’t make a bad choice and won’t screw this up no matter what they bring me. I’ll often note that I’ve perused the menu and everything looks good, so no matter what bowl, plate, or glass appears before me, I’ll be good. This takes any fears they may have about giving you the wrong dish or making a poor choice and having it impact their tip or worse yet, causing you to make a complaint to their manager.
3. Tip. Tip the waitstaff well. They worked hard for you. They selected your dishes, thought about how one course would build on another, highlighting their favourite combinations of food. They deserve to be rewarded for this, no matter how much you enjoyed the meal (or not). If the establishment you’re dining at builds the tip into the bill or you’re frequenting a place where tipping isn’t a customary practice, there’s an additional step you get to do. Call over the manager, maître d’, or even the host that greeted you. Praise the waitperson. “I asked Andy to bring me a selection of courses that were their top choices and the meal was just delicious. Please let them know how much I appreciated their care and attention and for playing along with me today.”
There’s solid magickal reasoning behind the three things you’ve been asked to give up and the three things you’ve been asked to do. As magick workers we often call on the gods or elements or mystery to intervene in our rituals and rites, but we script the results so tightly that we don’t leave a lot of room for anything wondrous or surprising to happen. We know when the magick will begin, what words will be said, and who does what. Even in ecstatic, non-book-centric traditions, there’s often a common format or expectation that a ritual or spell will look and sound a certain way and be completed in a specific time frame. While there is tremendous value in repeating magickal structures that work, there’s an inherent danger that our magickal practices can stagnate, become comfortable and predictable, and then be less effective. There’s an old saying, “magick happens where your comfort zone ends,” and I believe that to be true. Human beings are extremely habitual. We like what we like and, unless we’re forced to, most people rarely move beyond their comfort zone and try anything new. Our food choices display our habituation blatantly and absolutely.
Step one, dropping your judgement, challenges your own motives and moves you beyond questioning what you want to do versus what you think you should do. Look, if your feet take you to “Charlie’s Cheesecake Emporium,” go with it. Right now, something in you wants whatever magick cheesecake holds and you don’t need to spend seven hours pacing backwards and forwards from your car to the front door of the restaurant, chastising yourself for wanting a huge slice of New York–style cheesecake topped with the most decadent blueberry sauce in the world. You want what you want, so go get it and enjoy every sumptuous mouthful. The magick here is all about honouring what is calling you in the moment, fulfilling your heart’s desire. On another level, the magick here deals with listening deeply to your body and turning off the chattering in your head that tells you the thirty-seven reasons why you shouldn’t eat a perfectly seasoned center-cut pork chop, red bliss potatoes, and garlicky green beans for lunch by yourself just because you want to. You know what? You totally can.
Letting go of your expectations is crucial for the magick to work. One of my dear mentors has drummed it into my head that the magickal intention set for any spell work or ritual needs to be specific enough to be clear, but open enough to leave room for mystery. If you show up at a different restaurant than you expected, that’s a great start, but if you go ahead and order the vegetable curry like you do every time you find yourself in a southeast Asian restaurant, you’re going to have expectations about what a navratan korma is supposed to taste like. It’s not that expectation in and of itself is a bad thing, but magickally speaking, expectation can limit how you view the results of your spell work, because you could dismiss or outright miss a result that didn’t fit what you believed would happen. When you eat something new or unexpected, you may discover tastes and nuances in the dish that enliven your taste buds, or warm your belly, or inspire you to explore similar flavour combinations. Those curiosities might open a whole world of culinary and cultural adventures and, quite literally, flavour your magick for the rest of your life.
Giving your decision-making power over to the waitstaff really can push your buttons, but it is totally worth it. The magick here is an invitation to mystery, to chance, to calling in the unexpected and reveling in it rather than fearing it. For the past several years on my birthday, I get whisked off to a different restaurant. I never know where I’m going or what kind of food is going to be served. I’ve found myself pampered in three Michelin-star restaurants and standing in line on a cold winter’s night waiting for tacos from a truck. There have been birthday lunches at a converted brothel and high tea with scones and jams and petit fours, made with all-vegan ingredients.
One memorable birthday meal was at a small, family-run, newly-opened Ethiopian eatery. Our party was greeted at the door by the thirty-year-old owner, who had recently immigrated to the area. I looked over the menu, realised I knew nothing about Ethiopian food and asked for his recommendations. His face absolutely lit up as he went through each dish on the menu. For sure he listed ingredients, but it was the tales of where he learned to cook wat, an Ethiopian stew, that really captured my attention. Describing how his mother’s recipe for kinche, an oatmeal-like breakfast dish, reminded him so much of his childhood and how he was cared for and nourished by his family. I wanted to eat kinche right then and there.
He excused himself for a few minutes and emerged from the kitchen with an elderly woman in tow. Turns out this short, round, beaming person was his mother and he wanted to introduce her to us. Still a bit bemused by the sheer number of dishes on the menu, I asked if she would just bring us what she loved to cook. Nothing that came out of the kitchen that day was on the menu. We learned how to pile our food onto injera bread, and quaffed tej, a honey wine similar to mead.
Each person present for the meal thoroughly enjoyed exchanging stories about the “food where I come from.” The whole meal cost less than $30 per person and we were there for hours. It was one of the best food experiences of my life, but imagine if I’d gotten to the front door of the restaurant and said, “I don’t know anything about this kind of food, let’s go to the local burger joint because I know what I can order there.” Opening to the mystery and magick of the unexpected led to a new appreciation and passion for the incredibly rich, savoury, and complex flavours of Ethiopian cuisine. Engaging with your magickal practices with the same sense of mystery and earnest exploration, and seeking out new and different information will change how you approach magick, how you make magick, and the way you measure how effective your magick is.
In many magickal traditions, offering thanks to the gods is part of, maybe even the reason for, engaging in ritual. For non-deity or non-religion-based craft practices, appreciating the wonders and incalculable permutations, mutations, and variations of nature can be fulfilling components of regular practice. It’s common to thank the gods and notice the beauty of our planet; it’s not always so easy to notice and appreciate the person bringing you pancakes, scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, and orange juice at seven-thirty in the morning in the hotel restaurant, while you’re reading work emails on your phone or checking your secret social media group to catch up what your coven mates are doing. But appreciating your waitstaff, calling them by name, and saying please and thank you is just as important, maybe even more necessary, than your devotional practice to the goddess Bridgit or your daily ablutions to Thor.
Think back on the last time you ate at a sit-down restaurant. Did someone greet you at the door and take you to your table? Another person may have dropped off water or brought you coffee. Yet another person came by and asked if you were ready to order, told you all the options (hash browns or country fries, sourdough or whole wheat toast). Do you remember their name, the colour of their hair, or what the tattoo on their wrist said? Did you ask them how their day was going? If their shift had just started or if they were getting ready to head out for the day? Many witches spend hours, weeks even, planning spells, researching herbal combinations, the phases of the moon, the best time to do money-drawing work. Ask a hundred witches to rattle off the ingredients for a love brew and you’ll get a veritable Book of Shadows’ worth of detailed information about their most successful spells. Ask those same magick workers the name of the person that just brought them eggs benedict and a steaming cup of Earl Grey tea and you’ll likely get blank stares.
Witch work is all about connections and correspondences. Spells will work faster, stronger, longer if we get the correct combination of components gathered in just the right configuration. No herb, no drop of essential oil, no word in our incantation is unimportant, right? Apply that same idea to a dining experience. The waitstaff, the bus person, the host at the front of the restaurant, the dishwashers, and the cooks all contribute to your experience of the meal. No contribution is unimportant and, in this case specifically, no person is unimportant to the process. Just as you would thank the gods or your ancestors or the planets or the herbs or your teachers for the wisdom they bring to your magick, also thank the person that brings you a knife, fork, spoon, and a timely hotter-upper when your coffee cup is almost empty.
Tell me if this sounds familiar. You finally match up your schedule with your best friend’s schedule and you plan to meet for lunch at Bistro XYZ. On the way to your lunch date, you go to the post office, swing by the office supply store to get printer ink, drive around looking for parking, and arrive just in time to sit down and order your meal. A few minutes into hearing about your friend’s day, which consists of them telling you how busy they’ve been, you realise that you’ve got to pick the kids up in an hour or need to get to the next thing on your list and before you know it, you are talking about that instead of talking with your friend.
Try employing a buffer zone. Agree that the meal is going to start at 12:30 p.m. Also agree to arrive by 12:00 p.m. That extra half hour is dedicated to putting away coats, ordering the first drink, or finding the right table. In other words, set aside a specific period of time to get all of the busyness out of the way, so that when it’s time to sit down, eat, and chat, everyone can be fully present for that purpose and that alone.
If circumstances are such that you don’t dine out all that often, employ the buffer zone at home as well. You may have a busy household with housemates, kids, partners, or four-legged companions. Meal times can be hectic and not at all fulfilling. Again, the Sumerians had it right when they noted the differences between simply shoveling food into our mouths and actually dining. If your household mealtimes are frantic, rushed, anything but calming and restorative, consider employing the buffer zone. And to be super transparent, one doesn’t need a house full of other people to have a less than wonderful meal or to have need of a buffer zone. I’ve had more than my share of meals when I rush home from my day, throw my car keys on the counter, hurriedly grab something from the fridge, dance around the stove clanging pots and lids together, and throw a meal together quickly, all before the next thing I’m supposed to be doing begins.
What often occurs when you apply a buffer zone is this delicious moment when each person connects, makes eye contact, and takes a big breath together. It happens pretty organically, and it happens virtually every time. We begin settling into the time we have rather than being engaged with the time we don’t have because it’s filled with all sorts of other things to do. And that breath, that pause, is like a mini devotion honouring everybody present. Time slows down and shared food can then become the vehicle for connection and magick.
A Collection of Old Bowls
If time is the vehicle by which we appreciate the exquisite tastes of life, then what we fill our life with must be the spices. I choose to fill my life with a collection of old bowls. Oddly shaped and old bowls made of ceramic or wood fascinate me. I wonder what lives they’ve led before making their way to my cupboards. I have a wooden salad bowl that I bought at a thrift store I don’t know how many years ago. It is rough-hewn on the outside, but perfectly smooth on the inside. When I run my fingers around the outer edges, I feel indentations that remind me that someone else’s hands made this and cherished it. Over the years I’ve served rustic salads of wildcrafted greens, homemade sourdough rolls, and who knows what else out of this bowl. It’s been placed on more magickal altars that I could ever recount. Serving food in this simple handmade bowl that I love so much makes a meal special in a way I find hard to define, but I believe it has to do with three distinct facets: I’ve formed a connection with this bowl. It’s handmade. The bowl is made of natural materials. Each of these facets add a certain magick to the bowl and, ultimately, serves the magick I’m creating.
The materials that bowls or plates or serving platters are made of are important. Beyond the practical and mundane features of what makes them durable or easy to wash, for instance, is the connection to nature and our fellow human beings. Most of my most cherished serving bowls and cooking pans were gifted to me. None of them were overly expensive or top of the line, but they are all special to me. As I look at them, I’m struck by how many of them are handmade or, at the very least, had a human’s hands on them to finish the making process. Because of that they are always just a little unique. One edge is a little thicker than another, there’s a flaw in the glaze. I’m not sure just why, but salads are always tastier when they are served up in a large wooden bowl. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the components of the salad were once living, growing plants and so were the components of the bowl. It could be that the variegated colour tones of brown and taupe and the swirl of the grain compliment the fresh green shades found in the food. There’s a vague memory that container and contained are from the same source, and something in that adds an extra, invisible, ingredient that perfectly completes the flavour of the dish.
The memory of the thing transforms an ordinary cup into a magickal chalice. Plates that are hand painted carry a piece of the person that decorated them. A silver serving dish purchased at an antique store brings back memories of your romantic getaway with a beloved partner all those years ago. There’s an egg cup for serving soft-boiled eggs, in my cupboard. It’s plastic and has two outstretched feet with faded baby blue Mary Jane shoes. My grandmother bought it somewhere when I was three or four years old. Once upon a time there was a matching egg cup with pink shoes. One was hers, the other mine. There were probably a million of those egg cups mass produced, but the one in my cupboard is a one-of-a-kind treasure because her hands touched it. She taught me how to make “dippy eggs” and when to pull the bread out from under the grill and cut the warm toast into “soldiers” to dip into the yolk.
Look around your kitchen, your dining room, the box you keep childhood mementos in. What cooking items do you have that instantly transport you elsewhere, to another time, another version of you? What memories are contained in the cracks and chips and worn paint? If you haven’t done this already, share the stories of your beloved pots, pans, bowls, plates, and mixing spoons with other people in your life. Is there a chalice your coven uses during ritual? Where did you get it? Did you order it from an online retailer or find it in a thrift store at the bottom of a plastic tub full of odd cups and glasses? Why did you pick that particular plate to serve your magickal offerings on? Is it a family heirloom, a gift from another person in your magickal tradition, found at booth at a Pagan conference where you got to meet with the artist and learn what inspired them to create the horned-god motif baked into the clay? Every item you cook or serve with came from somewhere and has a story.
Stand in your kitchen. Find one bowl, plate, cup, whatever. Hold it in your hands, or if it’s too big and heavy, place it on the counter or a table and feel all around it; top, bottom, inside, outside. How have you used this item? What meals has this item been part of? Who has eaten from this? Whom have you fed? If this item had a voice, what stories would it tell about the magick it’s been involved with? And lastly, what stories have you told about this magickal piece of earthenware?
You might be asking, “Why am I standing in the kitchen talking to the mixing bowl”? It’s a fair question. If your magickal belief system encompasses the theory that every rock, stone, tree, wand, athame, and statue has its own life and experiences, then by that same magickal logic it follows that so does every teaspoon, baking dish, beer mug, and little round bowl you always make your famous guacamole in. If your kitchen gadgets and implements have been used to make magickal meals, then it’s quite likely that they carry a piece of that magick with them (it’s a proven fact in my household that no amount of dish soap can clean off magick … or burnt lasagna!).
The word soul comes to mind here. You needn’t necessarily believe in a soul, or that inanimate objects are somehow alive, but by using a thing over and over again for a specific purpose it does become imbued with a certain ineffable something. Maybe your word is different than mine. Your connection to your special cooking tool might be characterized as memory, or quirkiness, or personality, but there’s a definite something that happens when you mix your bread dough with that spoon, or serve your grandfather’s paella in that bowl. That’s the soul coming through. Another way to think of it is residual magick. Have you ever had the experience when cooking that the oven or mixer or bowl knows what it’s doing even when you don’t? It’s like it’s saying, “Oh! I’m filled with enchiladas again. I remember this recipe; it was handed down by their abuelita. They like it best when I let the edges get just a little too crispy. I’ll get to work on those edges right now!”
Just as doing the unexpected can bring new insights to your magick, working with familiar tools, proven recipes, and beloved cooking artefacts adds a certain known quality to the magick you’re making. Another word for familiarity might be tradition. Family and magickal traditions ensure that the knowledge and wisdom and practices that served those that have gone before us live on and thrive. When you next pull out your favourite dish or magickal tool, reflect on all the magick, laughter, sorrow, and community you’ve shared with this bowl or spoon.
Sing to Your Food
Yes! You read that correctly and it means exactly what you think it means. Sing to your food. It’s simple and great magick. I’d also recommend expanding the idea to singing for your food, singing about your food, and singing with your food. After all, singing to your food is a terrific way to remember simple recipes. For example, I don’t know anyone that puts the coconut in the lime and stirs it. We all know to put the lime in the coconut, and then, shake it all up. If you’re familiar with this recipe, there’s a good chance that right now you have a song in your head that will be there for the rest of the day. You’re welcome.
But why would you sing to your food? Well, it has a lot to do with joy and connection. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve cooked chicken, potatoes, and broccoli. Ask my children and they’ll tell you they’ve eaten it about a gazillion times. Cooking, especially cooking every day for other people, can get monotonous. Don’t get me wrong, I love cooking for friends and family, but negotiating the foods that everyone can eat versus what they will eat, versus what they want to eat, plus what’s in the budget to provide said foods can render food preparation an act of total drudgery. Throw in the shopping and the chopping and washing the dishes and you have a recipe for kitchen burnout. And that’s where joy comes in.
Singing releases endorphins. Endorphins are frequently referred to as the body’s ‘“feel good” chemicals. Singing, even if you do it under your breath so no one can hear you, increases the flow of oxygen to your brain. Oxygen feeds the brain and improves your overall mental alertness. When most people sing, they experience joy. Even if you’re listening to other people sing, your “joy” levels increase. As you sing, or hear others sing and your body releases endorphins, you stave off those feelings of “Sweet Brigid’s ghost, am I really baking skinless chicken and making mashed potatoes again?” Quite literally, you’re singing away any feelings of drudgery and replacing them with more joyful sensations. Singing to your food lowers your stress levels, curtails cortisol production, increases your joy levels, potentially enhances the experiences of those in your proximity because they also derive pleasure from hearing you sing, and makes the food taste better because you are more mentally alert and less likely to confuse the salt for the sugar.
The science and psychology of singing to your food is clear, but what about the magick? That’s pretty clear too, and it has everything to do with connection. Part of being a magick worker is to see and act upon the connections we feel with the totality of what’s around us. The artichokes in your garden are alive, and so is the basil growing in your kitchen window. When you sing to them, you are connecting with them. You might sing to your vegetables about how beautiful their leaves look today or the cleverness of knowing how to face the sun so that the ears of corn they are working on just this minute will be ever so sweet in a couple of months. Maybe you’ll feel silly singing to runner beans or acorn squash. I say go ahead and feel silly. Part of being a witch is to be wonderfully eccentric anyway, isn’t it?
Let’s stay with this idea of magickal connection though. Do you believe in nature spirits, or garden fairies, or ladybugs that eat aphids? You see, singing is a well-attested-to pastime of the fairy folk. In William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania, the queen of the fairies, exclaims:
First, rehearse your song by rote.
To each word a warbling note:
Hand in hand, with fairy grace,
Will we sing, and bless this place.
Singing and blessing the places where our food comes from seems like a very good use of magickal energy. How do the nature beings, seen and unseen, contribute to your food? When you sing to your food, you invite the Good Folk or the spirits of place or the Devas of the vegetable patch to do their best work. Singing encourages connection with the unseen forces of nature that work with us to transform these incredible materials of flesh, seed, and fruit into wonderful meals that sustain the human folk that then, in turn, plant more, sing more, and connect more to the world around them. Again, when you connect with the food growing in your garden or window boxes, or the foods you buy from the grocery store, or even the fast food you pick up because you’re running late and you connect with it in some way, you’re doing magick.
25. Charlotte J. S. De Backer, Maryanne L. Fisher, Karolien Poels, Koen Ponnet. “‘Our’ food versus ‘my’ food. Investigating the relation between childhood shared food practices and adult prosocial behavior in Belgium.” Appetite volume 84, January 2015.