The Medicine Is in the Kitchen: Why Cooking Your Own Food Is a Spiritual Act
By High Priestess Shoshana | Temple de la Luna Author of Watch Me Thrive and Serpent Sutra — available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kindle
They removed the kitchen from the center of life and called it progress.
They handed you a box. A bag. A drive-through window. They told you this was convenience — that saving time in the kitchen meant more time for living. What they did not tell you is what you lost when you stopped cooking your own food. What left your body. What left your bloodline.
Nature was my first friend. I was raised in the mountains of New Mexico where we grew things, picked things, prepared things with our hands. The women in my life knew that food was not fuel. Food was ceremony. Every meal was a conversation between the living and those who came before them. The herbs were not decoration. The fire was not just heat. The act of cooking was the act of staying in relationship with the earth — and through the earth, with everything that sustains us.
That knowledge is still alive. It is waiting for you to return to it.
What You Give Up When You Stop Cooking
There is something the body knows that the mind has forgotten.
When you cook your own food, you become a conduit. You are not just nourishing the body — you are making an offering. To your ancestors who fed themselves through their own hands. To the earth that grew what is now on your table. To the forces of nature that brought seed to soil to harvest to you.
When you hand that act over to a factory — to a corporation — you break that chain. You become a consumer instead of a participant. And the body feels the difference, even when the mind does not notice.
Processed food is not just nutritionally hollow. It is spiritually hollow. It has passed through no hands that prayed. No water that was blessed. No intention that said: I am feeding someone I love.
Cooking is one of the oldest spiritual technologies we have. Do not give it away cheaply.
The Movements That Remember
There are people — communities, tribes, small farmers, home herbalists — who never forgot. And there are others who are fighting to remember. They are worth knowing. They are worth supporting.
The Native American Food Sovereignty Movement is one of the most powerful living examples of what it means to reclaim your relationship with food as a sacred act. For generations, colonialism sought to supplant Indigenous peoples through many means — including the eradication of their well-established food and agriculture systems. Now, tribes across the country are fighting to bring those systems back. Indigenous food sovereignty is about who decides where and how food is harvested, gathered, hunted, fished, grown, prepared, distributed, and shared — and who benefits from those decisions. This is not just about feeding bodies. It is about feeding cultures. Restoring dignity. Honoring the intelligence of the land.
Tribes like the Wiyot in Northern California, the Yurok, and the Quapaw Nation in Oklahoma have been reclaiming ancestral lands specifically to restore traditional foodways — not as nostalgia, but as medicine. As power. As a refusal to be disconnected from the earth that made them.
The Gun Lake Tribe in Michigan has built a food sovereignty program around the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash — planted the ancient way, where the corn creates structure for the beans, the beans enrich the soil, and the squash protects the whole garden, all three working together the way a community is meant to work. This is planting as prayer. Gardening as ceremony.
These movements are not separate from your spiritual path. They are your spiritual path, made visible in the soil.
Small farms and seed-to-table growers are doing the same work on a different scale. The woman selling herbal tinctures at the Saturday market. The man who grows medicinal herbs in his backyard and trades them at the community gathering. The grandmother making elderberry syrup from a recipe older than the neighborhood she lives in. These are not hobbies. These are lineages. These are the last living links to a way of feeding ourselves that understood food as relationship, not transaction.
When you buy from them, you are not just making a purchase. You are voting with your dollars for the world you want to live in. You are saying: I believe in this. I want it to survive.
Come Back to the Kitchen
You do not need to be a chef. You do not need a garden or a farm or a degree in herbalism.
You need a pot. A fire. An intention.
Start with one meal a week cooked entirely from scratch. Go to your local farmers market and buy something you have never cooked before. Ask the person who grew it how they use it. That conversation is already medicine.
Find the person in your neighborhood who makes remedies, teas, sauces, preserves. Buy from them. Tell someone else about them. This is how traditions survive — through the small, daily choices of people who decide that real food made by real hands matters.
Learn one herb. Just one. Learn where it grows, what it heals, what it has been used for across cultures for thousands of years. Let that knowledge root in you. Then teach it to someone else.
At Temple de la Luna, we carry handmade holistic remedies, healing teas, and botanical treatments prepared the traditional Caribbean way — honoring the plants, the ancestors who knew them, and the bodies they were made to heal. Our urban sanctuary garden grows healing herbs the way my teachers grew them: with patience, with prayer, with deep respect for what the earth offers when you ask her properly.
This is the work. Not separate from the spiritual path — the spiritual path itself, expressed through the most ancient human act there is.
She Is Still Feeding Us
The earth has not abandoned us. She is still producing medicine. She is still offering herself through every seed, every root, every leaf. The fires and the floods and the winds — they are her language, and she has been speaking for a long time.
We can choose to listen.
Go home and cook something. Buy something local. Support the person in your community who is keeping the old ways alive with their hands. Sit at a table with someone you love and eat food that was made with intention.
That is ceremony. That is connection. That is how you stay in relationship with the great Mother who is still, even now, trying to feed you.
Priestess Shoshana is the founder of Temple de la Luna and, a Mambo, Medicine Woman, and author of Watch Me Thrive and Serpent Sutra, available now on Amazon, Kindle, and Barnes & Noble. Services include holistic healing remedies, medical intuitive readings, spiritual life coaching, and sacred ceremony.
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