In his spiritual treatise, The Tao of Wu, RZA addresses food and spirituality from a profoundly simple level. In the chapter, “Man and Animal,” (p. 147) he says:
“I don’t eat meat-- I’ve been vegetarian since 1995. But I didn’t stop because I became a Buddhist or a Hindu. I stopped because I had a revelation I was eating dead animals.
...In fact, Dirty and I didn’t eat meat from ages fourteen to sixteen, but then we started getting into sex and drugs and that led to us being carnivorous.
But this time, my student saw me eating a steak and he pointed to the bone... ‘You eat that?’ And I was like, ‘Hey, I don’t eat pork, but I think it’s everybody’s choice.’ But something about what this kid said made me reassess. And from that day forth I didn’t eat red meat anymore.
...I started thinking about it like, ‘I’m alive, I have a life, my flesh is alive. Why should I eat something that’s dead?’
...I started reading books about it...that at one point everything that we ate was alive-- we’d eat from the tree, from the ground, our droppings would feed the tree. It was all life and therefore man didn’t die. When he put death into his body, he started to die.
From that point on, I ate to live.”
His reference to “death” can be understood best metaphorically. Of course all life dies; the two are inseparable. We need not elude Death so much as we should better care for Life. Illness, disease, pathology; these are the deaths to which RZA speaks: When he put death into his body, he started to [experience dis-ease]. How life-affirming are the foods we put into our bodies? What kind of sounds into our ears? How nourishing is the environment in which we live? Nourishment goes far beyond food. Eat to live. Think to live. Speak to live.
