https://oshofriends.com/dictionary/66553You are missing the totality of eating, then you are not tasting your food. How can you do it? The mind is capable of doing only one thing at a time; it cannot do two things together -- it is impossible.
If you are eating, then let your whole consciousness be that of taste, of smell. Forget everything! Then even ordinary bread may taste like the most delicious food possible. But you are not present.
Look at people eating -- they are talking, there are people who are listening to the radio or seeing to the TV. I have heard about stupid Americans even making love while seeing the TV! -- what to say about eating? Why miss? You can do both the things -- you can make love and you can go on seeing the TV. Now, neither you will be seeing the TV nor you will be making love; you will not be able to enjoy either, you will miss both. There are people who cannot eat if they don't have company to talk and gossip and to discuss. When you are talking you go on swallowing -- swallowing is not eating.
Eating should be meditative, prayerful. You should be more respectful to food because it is life, it is nourishment. And then thousand and one problems arise out of it. Because while you are eating you are reading the newspaper or quarreling with the wife or listening to the radio or looking at the TV or talking to a friend or holding the phone, you will miss the joy of eating. You will eat more because your taste buds will not feel fulfilled and contented. Then you will gather unnecessary fat in the body. Then one has to start dieting, fasting, naturopathy and all kinds of nonsense follow. But the simple thing that should have been done in the first place was: just eating and not doing anything else. [....]
The most stupid thing in life is to live halfheartedly, because the moment that is gone is gone forever. But people are living so unconsciously that it is almost impossible for them to be conscious of what they are doing. [....]
If you watch your life you will see what you go on doing. And it is not only so about the ordinary people, but the people you call very extraordinary, the geniuses; they are also as unconscious as you are, or even more so.
-Osho, “Zen: The Special Transmission, #3”
