Bless This Food by Adrian Butash

Bless This Food by Adrian Butash is a collection of prayers and blessings to say at mealtime. It features 160 such blessings from a variety of cultures and religions. If you enjoy saying mealtime blessings for your family, this is a book you’ll want to read!

Book Description

“Grace before meals is the prayer said most often in homes around the world, an act of worship common to every known society. The universal experience of sharing food fundamentally connects people to one another, to nature, and to the infinite. Expressing thanks for food represents a wonderful tradition that acknowledges bounty and our daily sustenance as gifts from the divine.

Bless This Food presents 160 timeless mealtime blessings in an easy-to-use format. The eloquent prayers and poems have been carefully selected from the world’s major religions, ancient traditions, and the work of great poets and thinkers, with sources ranging from Shakespeare to Starhawk, Tecumseh to the Tamil tradition, the North American plains to Pakistan. Each grace is introduced with cultural context and details about its history and evolution. Also included are two prayers in American Sign Language and the short prayer “bless this food” in nineteen languages. The result is a unique kind of soul food — and a recipe for gratitude at any mealtime gathering.” – Bless This Food

My Thoughts

Bless This Food is a beautifully gathered collection of prayers of gratitude for the food we eat. If you and your family say a blessing before meals, this is definitely a book that you would enjoy reading and incorporating some of the blessings into mealtimes in the future. The explanations on the blessings are also great mealtime conversation that will help everyone learn more about the different cultures covered in the book.

Overall, this is a fun and educational read. I especially liked reading about the history of the different blessings. I enjoyed reading this book and learning more about the other cultures that differ from my own when it comes to these mealtime blessings. I definitely recommend this book, and I also think it would make a great present for someone you know who enjoys saying mealtime blessings, too.

* Thank you to the publisher of Bless This Food, New World Library, for providing me with a copy of this book for review. All opinions expressed are my own.