GEN184 Surrounded by an endless variety of edible plant life [this verse], Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden by God, to till and to tend Genesis 2:15, to work in the Garden, and to be shomrei adadah, “guardians of the earth.”  Life was easy in Eden, for everywhere they looked food was readily at hand, every tree pleasing to the sight and good for food Genesis 2:9.  Today, however, how ironic it is that we too are surrounded by food, but we have lost our sense of kesher, our connection to the food, to the land, and to our Creator. … Even when we think about healthy eating, we reduce food to proteins and carbohydrates, vitamins and mineral fiber and fat.  We label our food as good or bad.  Food is more than a combination of chemicals that taken in the right doses keeps us alive.  Food, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad. The food we eat sustains us, nourishes us, and connects us to each other to the earth, and to the Creator of the earth.  Food is to be enjoyed and savored.  If we have no kesher to our food, we are even farther from a sense of kesher to the land. We do not know the sources of our food, how our food is grown, where it is grown, how it is harvested or the ramifications of those choices.  We do not understand that the cultivation of what we eat can actually be destructive to the fertility and the sustainability of the land.  This destruction of essential resources is an unnecessary waste that the biblical and rabbinical literature would call bal tashchit. (By Batsheva Appel, "Connecting Locally: Jumping Off the Producion Line") SACTAB 173-4