{"id":616,"date":"2004-04-02T11:27:05","date_gmt":"2004-04-02T15:27:05","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=616"},"modified":"2009-01-20T12:35:59","modified_gmt":"2009-01-20T16:35:59","slug":"blessing-the-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2004\/04\/blessing-the-food\/","title":{"rendered":"Blessing the Food"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Adam has raised an interesting point about <a href=\"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/archives\/000611.html\">preparation for prayer<\/a>, which reminded me of a question I&#8217;ve wondered about for a while: why do we <i>bless<\/i> our food?<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nWe are commanded to recognize the Lord&#8217;s hand in all things (<a href=\"http:\/\/scriptures.lds.org\/dc\/59\">D&#038;C 49:21<\/a>), and a prayer of thanks for our food is an obvious way to do so, so I don&#8217;t wonder why we begin our meals with prayer. Instead I wonder why we almost universally speak of that prayer as a &#8220;blessing on the food&#8221; (rather than a prayer of thanks) and why we feel that words of blessing on the food are a necessary part of such prayers. Is this a custom whose origins are lost in our history? Is it an artefact of the New England origins of so many early converts? Something remaining from a time when unrefrigerated food was more dangerous than it is today?<\/p>\n<p>Any ideas?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Adam has raised an interesting point about preparation for prayer, which reminded me of a question I&#8217;ve wondered about for a while: why do we bless our food?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mormon-life"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6484,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions\/6484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}