All of my life I was taught to pray before meals (a great thing to do), but I was taught to pray, "Lord bless this food..." However, over the past few months, I have begun praying with more traditional Hebrew food blessings, which are quite different. This is the exact prayer I said yesterday:
Blessed are you LORD our GOD, King of the universe, who has given us a variety of good foods to eat.
There is a drastic difference between these two prayers. In the first I was taught to pray "Lord, bless this food", but in the second I prayed "Blessed are you LORD". Blessing God, not the food.
It actually seems quite laughable to me now looking back that in the past I used to ask God to bless food. Prayer before and after meals is for the purpose of blessing, thanking, and praising God for His provisions. We bless God for giving us food. We don't bless the food.
My whole life (until just a few months ago), I ate whatever I wanted without any concern for what God said was kosher (clean to eat). I would eat pork or shellfish, and pray - "God bless this food", and until yesterday I never realized what I was actually saying. I was asking God to bless unclean animals so that I could eat them. Once I realized this, I was so upset with myself that I prayed for forgiveness.
The LORD has given us a variety of wonderful foods to eat (fruits, vegetables, fish, meat, poultry, bread, etc.), and we should be very grateful for the wonderful things He has given us. Think about it, God could have made us eat grass like cows, but instead, He has given us a variety of good and tasty things to eat. God is so good to us, and we can be so ungrateful at times.
With all of this in mind, the revelation that I had yesterday was this. We bless God for the good things he has given us to eat, but when we chose to eat the things that God says are "unclean to eat", we are being very ungrateful (especially when we ask God to bless it). We are basically telling God that the foods he gave us to eat are not enough for us. By eating pig, we are being ungrateful for the kosher meats that God set aside for us. When we eat shrimp, we are being ungrateful for the variety of kosher fish that God set apart for us.
I also realized that this goes all the way back to the garden of eden when God gave the very first kosher law. God gave Adam and Eve all of the trees in the garden to eat from except one tree. All the plants were good for food except for one tree that God said was off limits. They could have lived in the garden happily eating all sorts of fruits and vegetables, and never gone hungry. But, we know the story, Eve ate some of the fruit, then gave some to Adam and he ate it too. They ultimately decided that they would not obey God's simple rule about what food they should not eat. Adam and Eve were unsatisfied and ungrateful with all of the wonderful foods that God gave them to eat, so they ate the forbidden fruit, and mankind has suffered the consequences ever since.
So, my conclusion is this: Bless God for giving us such wonderful things to eat, and gratefully eat only those things that God has said are good for food. Don't be ungrateful by eating things God has said are not to be eaten, because this is an act of rebellion and disobedience. Be grateful that we are not like cows having only grass to eat. God is good, and He has blessed us with wonderful things to eat, so bless God by eating only those things that He says are to be eaten.