While my family continues to sleep, my pre-work breakfast at 4:30am usually contains 4 things: a bowl of granola, a pickle spear, a banana, and a bit of Kombucha. I like how pickles are sour.
I thought that my breakfast wasn't very meaningful. It's just food. Not a big deal. But recently, I've begun to think it is significant. That it connects me to others. I like the idea that my breakfast has more meaning than just what I need to start the day.
As I stared at the pickle on my fork, I wondered who helped grow this pickle. Where did they live? How big was their family? Had they been farming this land for generations? How much money did they make? Did they use lots of machines or is much of their work done by hand? Did they live near a big city or many hours away from an urban center? What chemicals were they exposed to as part of their job? Do they have kids? If so, how old are they? Have they heard of Crash Landing On You?
I'm my mind, I envisioned the farmer, maybe a hired farm hand or two. Depending on how the pickle was grown and where it was grown, it might have been harvested by a tractor or it might have been picked by hand.
There were several people involved in growing this one pickle.
Then I thought about my granola that has oats, sugar, crisped rice, honey... Each of those crops had someone, probably many people behind them.
The banana, and the kombucha, each have their own sets of people behind them. And this doesn't include the people involved in the processing, packaging creation, shipping, and other tasks required to deliver my breakfast.
If I had bought a different brand of pickle or a different box of granola, a whole different group of people with a different set of life and work circumstances would have been behind my breakfast. My decision to choose the pickles I bought, the granola I purchased, and the bananas I grabbed at the store, determined the lives my breakfast was going affect.
Who knew that my breakfast would connect my life with so many other's lives. It turns out, breakfast changes a lot of things.