Praying Before Meals Posted on August 9, 2026 by gaudetetheology Do you pray before meals? Sometimes, always, never? What do you pray? Is there a standard or traditional prayer that you have memorized and always say? Do you have several standards, and vary them? Is it free form? Does it depend? What do you pray for? Or, perhaps, what is your prayer doing? Is it a prayer of thanksgiving? A blessing? An offering? A petition, or request? A conversation? I would sincerely love to learn more about other people’s practices in this area, not only from my faithful readers but from others in your network as well – please share widely and/or canvass your peeps & report back. 😀 I grew up saying a standard grace before meals, most memorably in my first Catholic school, in Queens. At Our Lady of Fatima, after everyone had filed down to the cafeteria and picked up their milk and gotten settled at their tables, no one started eating until after we all — the entire elementary school, students and teachers alike — had said grace together: Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord Amen. There was no such practice at my second Catholic school, in Rhode Island; but St Joe’s did sponsor a Girl Scout troop, and on our camping weekends we said – or sang – a grace before every meal. There were a few options in our GS songbook. The most memorable, because it was the shortest and thus chosen most often by whichever girls’ turn it was to choose, was this: Morning* is here, the board is spread: Thanks be to God, who gives us bread. *Morning, Noontime, Evening My Catholic junior high (grades 7-9) also had no such practice, but had frequent prayer services (think “assembly”, but with prayer) with plenty of music with meaningful lyrics, including several pieces from Godspell, which was hugely popular at the time – we even did a school trip to see a live performance in a nearby city. One of those songs was “All Good Gifts”, which I still know much of by heart: We plow the fields and scatter the good seed on the land but it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand. He sends the snow in winter, the warmth to swell the grain, the breezes and the sunshine, and soft refreshing rain All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above So thank the Lord, oh thank the Lord for all his love When I was in (public) high school, my Protestant grandparents would come visit us for a few days every summer, driving over from Michigan in their camper. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not exactly sure what their faith tradition was in those years. I doubt they’d have described themselves as “Protestant”, but that’s all I knew to call them then, from within the supermajority Catholic communities I grew up in. My dad and his siblings were raised in a Holiness tradition, which I don’t know much about, so maybe it was that. Anyway, their style of prayer was for my grandfather to pray aloud on behalf of the whole group, in what I can best describe as a stream of consciousness style, with almost every phrase punctuated by the name of the Lord (Lord, mostly, I think), and then we all said Amen at the end. This wasn’t just for praying before meals; he prayed that way right before they left to go home, too, as we all stood in a circle. And when I say “punctuated”, I really mean it – read over that last paragraph and put “Lord” everyplace I put a comma, and you’ll get the idea. It was very alien to me (or as my 14yo self would put it, “that seems like a really weird way to pray”), and as a result I don’t really remember the content of those prayers. I have the vague impression that they started by thanking God for the food, and then turned into thanking God for a bunch of other things that came to mind. So I’m reasonably sure that my grandfather’s prayer before meals was primarily a prayer of thanksgiving. In high school, or maybe college, I encountered this minimalist prayer before meals: Good bread, good meat – Good God, let’s eat! This was likely intended as a joke, or as technical compliance with praying before meals, but honestly? It works — at least if you repunctuate it a little: Good bread, good meat, good God: Let’s eat! As an adult, first on retreat with the Sisters of Bon Secours in their cafeteria, and later at the Mt St Agnes Theological Center for Women (supported by the Sisters of Mercy) in their dining room, I encountered the practice of applauding the actual living people who had prepared the food in thanks for their efforts, in addition to saying a grace that thanked God. (That wasn’t a brand new idea to me; when I had Sunday dinner with my HS boyfriend’s family, his dad always growled something about “thank your mother for the meal” which elicited a chorus of “thanks mom” — but that felt more like patriarchy than thanksgiving, to be honest.) In recent years, I’ve become more attuned to labor justice, prompted by the increasingly dreadful treatment of workers by tech giants by Amazon and the growth of the precarious gig economy. So when I started regularly saying grace again, about a year ago, this is what emerged: Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy gifts, and all those whose labor prepared them: those who planted, and tended, and harvested, and slaughtered, and packed, and shipped, and prepared, and delivered. Bless them, we pray, with good working conditions and good wages for their labor through which we have received this food to eat today. We ask you this in the name of your Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life. Amen, Amen, Amen.1 That list of verbs can vary a bit depending on exactly what is on my plate (harvested, slaughtered, fished, milked, churned… although I usually let “prepared” cover a lot, I try to think about everything that was actually required). “Delivered” is used here more broadly than the usual “pickup or delivery” context: it reminds me that, except for the rare occasions when I’m only eating food from the farmer’s market, there’s a long multi-step supply chain between where the plants and animals grew, and the shelves of my grocery store, and that somebody has to schlep the stuff from one place to another, every step along the way. So, to answer my own question above, what is this prayer doing? It asks God to bless me, and the food I’m about to eat (“for our great good and your great glory” floats around in my head from somewhere there), and every single person who was involved in producing that food… and it draws attention to how very many people and how very much labor is needed in order for me to have this food to eat today. It invokes Jesus specifically as the Bread of Life, to connect that heavenly metaphor back to the ordinary food from which it emerged. Those are the things I intended it to do, when I wrote it. It has done one more thing that I didn’t see coming: it has made me more aware of how much I depend on the work of all those very many people that I do not know, for it is only through their labor that I receive the food I eat. It has increased my sense of gratitude to those people who are unknown to me… …and gratitude, gratiarum, is why we call it “saying grace.” * That triple Amen is the influence of Fr Joe Muth, who often says mass for the Baltimore Carmelites which I attend online: he always leads us in a triple “Thanks be to God, thanks be to God, thanks be to God!” at the end of Mass. ↩︎ This entry was posted in Prayer and tagged #blaugust, #blaugust2026, food, justice, labor, prayer, saying-grace, spiritual practice, theo-prayer. Bookmark the permalink. 5 Responses to Praying Before Meals