LEV16 The offerings at the Mishkan in the Wilderness and at the shrines in Shiloh and Jerusalem are mostly grain, fruit, and meat, the foods that spring from the soil of the land of Israel. Even pancakes--"fine flour mixed with oil and spices, then turned to smoke upon the Altar"--are a path to God. This practice taught that the relationship adam and adamah was the expression of relationship with God. So it is not surprising that biblically, and then in rabbinic tradition, elaboration of proper and improper foods, what was and what was not kosher to eat, took on immense importance in defining a sacred life. Animals described by their relationship to earth, sea, and air embodied into intimate human relationship those three primal aspects of God's process of creation. Separating mammalian foods of life ( milk) and death (meat) became a marker of sacred imitation of God Who gave life or decreed death. Although rabbinic Judaism focused on the sacred uses of the mouth to chant words of prayer and passages of Torah and midrash much more than eating as a way of connecting with God, choosing what to you eat never lost its sacred power in rabbinic practice. Not until modernity became a central theme of much of Jewish life did "secular" Jews and "Reform" Jews put aside eating as a sacred connection with the Earth and God. (By Arthur Waskow, "Jewish Environmental Ethics: Intertwining Adam with Adamah")