Six close friends, we were together for a night of dinner out and then coffee back at Gail’s house. We discussed: restaurants, ISIS, Obama, Joan Rivers, Republicans, Democrats, The Middle East, Ukraine, some  theater and some TV.

We also discussed chicken sex.

I introduced the topic as I told them about the mindful eating seminar I had attended online and the articles I had read about mindful eating on the Internet. Scientists have provided some interesting data that eating mindfully can be a help to emotional eaters who want to lose weight.

It was clear from the weird looks on my friends’ faces that they had no idea what mindful eating was.

“The theory is if you eat mindfully and are aware of everything you put in your mouth, you will eat only when truly hungry,” I explained and shared what I recalled from an article about people who went to a monastery to learn mindful eating from the monks.

“At the monastery, the participants sit at a large table in silence,” I explained. “Slowly and deliberately, the monks teach them to touch their raisin, lift it, smell it, think about the grape it used to be, put it in their mouths, roll it around without biting it, bite it, chew it, and eventually swallow it.”

I told my friends that I was OK mindfully eating a raisin, but when it came to mindfully eating other food, I had a problem.

I always ended up thinking about sex.

For example when I was trying to eat some egg salad mindfully, my mind moved from eggs to chickens. Then I started wondering if chickens have sex?

Thus, to my table of friends, I posed the question, “Do you think chickens have sex?”

“Well, that’s why you have roosters,” said one.

“Chickens lay eggs,” said another. “Frogs lay eggs and they don’t have sex.”

I contributed, “In frogs, doesn’t the female lay eggs and then the male passes over them and fertilizes them? “

“Chickens are birds,” someone said. “Birds have sex.”

We never resolved the issue of chickens going “all the way” because Gail served her coffee cake and Jane’s banana cake. The six of us chowed down, and our conversation moved to liberals, conservatives, boots on the ground, and winters in Florida.

Tomorrow is another day to try mindful eating.