The Clear Sky Food Philosophy
“The Most Beautiful for the Least Effort”
The Clear Sky kitchen is a locus where all our values and practices come together – a mandala of mindful awareness, grounded community, and holistic ecology. Before we even open the fridge, countless hands, lives, and natural forces have worked to create the food we eat. It only feels right to honour that richness by shaping it into something beautiful.
For us, the most beautiful in the kitchen means a dinner table that aligns with our quadruple bottom line [link to page], and the least effort means a generative engine that nourishes and uplifts. A lot of effort does go into every meal, but we make sure that every ounce of that effort counts towards a result that is wholesome and beautiful.
Food as Practice
At Clear Sky, we use the kitchen and meal times as active meditations – cultivating presence, gratitude, and embodied awareness in an area of life that can often be hasty, stressful and chaotic. The benefits of this practice ripple throughout all facets of life, elevating consciousness, and bringing more joy and ease to our day.
The Clear Sky community eats together every day, three meals a day. We eat in silence for the first 10 minutes of each meal, honouring the Buddha’s meditation on nutriment, and encouraging the mind to rest in the body. Once the 10 minutes have passed, our conversations are focused on dharma and wholesome topics; we also consume our words! Wholesome conversation supports wholesome digestion.
Many guests rediscover what it means to eat three balanced meals on schedule — a rhythm that nourishes body and mind. With this structure, we honour all the life and energy that goes into our meals.
Local Food, Global Flavours
Wholesome food is also delicious! There’s no reason for saints and spiritual seekers to subsist on gruel and peas. The Clear Sky kitchen goes beyond local, healthy, and organic, embracing joy and curiosity through exploration of flavours from around the world.
Our aim is to eat local food with global flavours — celebrating the diversity of world cuisines through the lens of mindfulness, nourishment, and play. How can we cook Italian risottos, Mexican braises, Indian dals or Thai curries using the bounty that grows in the foodshed around us?
Our kitchen manager, Dave, is a trained chef who endeavours to bring some of the luxuries of high-end cuisine into our everyday meals with simplicity and ease.
Cooking as Karma Yoga
Everyone in residence at Clear Sky learns to cook for 20–30 people with minimal help. The kitchen is a unique dojo for service and self-observation: noting preferences and surrendering to the practice of community eating — an endangered practice we are joyfully reviving!
Learning to let go of our food “needs” and wants, and to explore foods we would not normally eat teaches flexibility, humility, and care. How does it feel to cook something your sangha loves to eat but your taste buds are not so keen on? Can we abandon our small personal tastes and instead develop a food mudita (sympathetic joy) for group nourishment?
Ultimately, cooking together fosters teamwork, mindfulness, and importantly, humour!
Eating in Place
Clear Sky practices a living version of the 100-mile diet. We work closely with local organic farmers and food artisans, shaping our meals around what is growing, harvesting, and storing well in our region. This keeps our kitchen grounded in the realities of place and season — not just in principle, but in practice.
When food comes from nearby fields and kitchens, the distance between effort and nourishment shortens. We feel the seasons more clearly, adapt to their limits, and learn to cook creatively with what the land is offering right now.
(See our supplier map/table below for the farms and producers we work with.)
Our pantry tells the story of the year. Preserved vegetables, grains, ferments, and staples reflect what was abundant, what needed saving, and what will carry us through winter. This rhythm teaches both humility and trust: humility in accepting limits, and trust in the land’s capacity to provide when we work in relationship with it.
Local Food as Spiritual Ecology
At Clear Sky, local food is part of our spiritual ecology — the living system that supports practice.
Eating locally brings us into direct contact with interdependence — land, weather, farmers, labour, soil, and time — all meeting at the table. When food travels shorter distances, cause and effect become easier to see. Attention sharpens. Gratitude becomes specific. Responsibility becomes lived rather than abstract. In this way, food itself becomes part of practice: choosing carefully, preparing mindfully, and receiving what the land offers with care.
Closing Invitation
Come eat, cook, and awaken with us.
The Clear Sky kitchen nourishes more than the body — it feeds awareness, community, and love for the world itself.
