The history of food as culture starts back in the Neolithic period with the development of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent in 8000 BCE; soon after, the synthesis of cuisine in ancient Mesopotamia began. Ancient Armenia was an epicenter of culture exchange of classical antiquity, where Sumerian, Acadian, Aramaic and Hettetian cultures spilled over and mixed. This tradition of  cultural exchange passed down from generation to generation and reached the modern era through manuscripts, ethnographic research — and because of Armenia’s role as a crossroads of antiquity, some of these ancient culinary traditions survive in today’s ethnic cuisine. It is of the utmost importance to sustain and promote these customs as a way to keep alive and embrace our connections to this ancient and storied past.

As a culture of any ethnic group express the concentration of its traditional skills, the food culture of the ethnos based on the manifestation of the impact of the food on the way of thinking, psychology, philosophy, behavior and lifestyle of the people that composing the ethnic group. The most important detail of the entire food culture of any nation – is a conscious or meaningful eating. If we look closely at the feast of the Armenians, we can see how eating more dependent on the consciousness of dining than on the food itself.

This remarkable experience of the ancient agricultural practices of grandfathers that creating a renaissance in the culture of food in the Land of Noah and passed from generation to generation trough centuries and millennia’s. Unfortunately this tradition of harmonic agriculture and balance traditional foods and food processing are damaged by modernization of “civilization” and mechanization.

To explain the unknown the Armenians created a complex and bewildering theology that drew on the sun and the sky, the four elements and man, as well as every form of life, that was included a pantheon of human gods and goddesses in pagan time. Their beliefs greatly influenced the ancient world and have been incorporated into many ancient religions such as Zoraostriszm and Manuizm.

The main messages of Meaningful Eating are:

• A person is formed and sustained by the life not by food, but by spirit. In us is something completely different than what we ate. We have completely transformed these things. Inside man there is a transforming power. However, since then this has been forgotten for several centuries, even millennia. In fact, we build ourselves from what is above of earth and material.

• Everything that we have in ourselves is not built from the substance of the Earth, but from the fact that above the substances of the earth – from the spirit.

• For human health and disease, it is absolutely not important to know how much carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, fat, protein, carbohydrates and so on are food products – these are abstract concepts. But for the health and disease of man in principle it is important to know how it is with the vitality of food. So close to each other are food and poisoning. Most of the diseases are foodborne illnesses, which means that the nutrition did not pay attention to the fact that the relevant substances should only come in a certain amount, because they must be processed.

• There is a definite relationship between what is called digestion and what is called mental activity. In other words: what is digestion in the lower region, the thought activity in the higher region is.

• A person can organize his meals in such a way that he only needs a short time to digest food, while another may have a lot of time.