What follows will one day, hopefully, be in a book I’ve been working on far too long already.
“Food is God’s love made nutritious and delicious.” Norman Wirzba, theologian
“Most people don’t give much thought to food as long as it’s there and it doesn’t cost too much.” Shane Burchfiel, Tennessee farmer
What if food matters and not simply to fill our bellies.
What if food reveals something of God to us. What if, instead of shoveling anything and near-everything into our mouths, too hurriedly to ask what it is and too distracted to care what it was, we understood food and eating as parts and acts of worship, or at the least, acknowledgment of good things that come from the Father of Lights (James 3).
The concept of this book came one day as I was “saying grace” over lunch. I began to think about the words a suburbanite like myself recites when praying over a meal.
“Thank You for this food You have provided.”
“Thank You for Your many blessings.”
“Bless this food and the hands that prepared it.”
Then I thought about how the same words would have meant something different years ago to a farmer raising his family on food they themselves had raised. His wife and children who joined him in the field planting after the vernal equinox, then harvesting beans, peas, tomatoes, and grains from late-summer into fall. Grateful at mealtime for blessings they had planted, tended, picked, hulled, washed, and prepared; cows they had pastured; hogs they had slopped; goats they had milked; and hen’s eggs gathered morning-by-morning.
In between planting in the hopeful spring and the relentless harvest sun, farmer’s eyes turned skyward, emotions ranging between anticipation and anxiety about rains that came too early, too late, just as needed, or not at all. Concerns about pests for which -icides did not yet exist, at the mercy of scavenging hordes of vegetarians on the wing who could decimate a crop, consuming in minutes what had taken months for the gestating ground to birth. Animals, some named, loved, and nurtured from birth, led daily from barn to yard or pasture and returned at evening to same, fed as needed, protected when threatened, then, eventually, sacrificed into chops, hams, roasts, steaks, ribs, bacon, sausage, drumsticks, and breasts, wings, and neck-bones, providing what the family needed and, perhaps, selling the rest.
“Thank you for this food you have provided,” means something different coming from my tongue when the sum total of my anxiety is waiting too long to find a parking space at Kroger, where I soon roam—in cool, blissful air-conditioning—for shiny waxed fruits and vegetables, selected, packaged, wrapped, waxed, arranged—utterly detached from the earth from whence they sprang, the farmers that grew them, the machines—or humans—that harvested them, the warehouses that stored them, and the trucks that delivered them, and retaining only a paycheck relationship to the Produce Department employees who stocked them. A child could be forgiven for not knowing apples, oranges, celery, and ginger root do not grow on shelves or that eggs don’t arrive on earth in cartons, free of feathers, hay, and excrement.
“This food You have provided,” indeed.
“The more divorced we are from the cultivation of crops and animals, and the more mechanical and manufactured our food appears to us, the less we see it as a gift,” writes Alan Noble. “When our meals come to us carefully wrapped in paper from hands wrapped in latex gloves that took ingredients from hermetically sealed plastic bags that were created in a sanitary, automated factory, it is no easy thing to see the hand of God at work providing for us. Contingencies of weather and seasons, human error, and animal behavior and health have been carefully, systematically, and technologically reduced as much as possible…Humanity has mastered nature, and we owe humanity no gratitude—just some monetary compensation.” (Disruptive Witness, pg 114)
It is not the fault of the average eater that the industrial revolution, having produced mechanization and perfected production turned its focus from inanimate objects like steel and plastic to those with life and breath like chickens and pigs. The results have not been stellar. We are certainly no closer to Eden; we might actually be closer to Sodom.
Farmer/philosopher Joel Salatin notes,
“What happens when you don’t ask: how do we make pigs happy? Well, you view the pig as just a pile of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly human hubris can imagine to manipulate it. And when you view life from that kind of mechanistic, arrogant, disrespectful standpoint, you very soon begin to view all of life from a very disrespectful, arrogant, manipulative standpoint. And the fact is, we aren’t machines.” 2
I’m just supposing here, but maybe trying to build food like Mercedes builds a turbodiesel is not what God had in mind when he commanded “Let the earth produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and fruit trees” and “let the animals produce after their own kind” (Genesis 1:11).
What if eating is more than masticating a leaf of lettuce or kernel of corn until it is sufficiently reduced from its original form to swallow and digest it. If meals are to be more than nutrient pit-stops, what else “more” might they be? What if we didn’t speed through mealtime like a culinary Indy 500, the checkered flag a clean plate and hopefully a clean shirt, too.
What if we expected of mealtime what God expects of mealtime, which, as we discover in the Bible’s pages, is what Jesus experienced at mealtime. Jesus showed us what God would do all the time including when food was involved: enough food, not enough food, more of the same kind of food, unexpected food, unexpected drink. Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptizer, lived a life of culinary austerity (“he came neither eating nor drinking”), but Jesus came both eating and drinking. The Baptizer was said to have a demon; the Son was said to be a glutton.
If you can’t beat’em, you might as well eat.
Jesus showed us not only how to relate to food, he showed us who we could eat it with. Jesus ate with the religious and the irreligious, the unrighteous and the self-righteous (who were also unrighteous, it just wasn’t as obvious), the Pharisees and prostitutes, the proud and the penitent. He was nothing if not an indiscriminate feaster. If holy living means avoiding the riff-raff, sexually problematic, thieves, political turncoats, frauds, and other sinners, Jesus didn’t make the grade. And to most of the religious leaders, he didn’t. In the eyes of the religiarchy, being a “friend of sinners” disqualified you from being a “friend of God.” Jesus turned that on its head and regularly used meals to do so. To him, it seems, one cannot be a friend of God unless he or she is a friend of sinners as well. Indeed, in the gospels we find sinner, saint, and Sovereign together at the table.
Mealtime does not appear to have been an outlier for Jesus. He did not squeeze in a rushed All-You-Can-Eat at the Galilee Catfish House before the next round of sermons, healings, deliverances, and raisings-from-the-dead. Mealtime was a feature of his earthly ministry. He fully embraced eating, drinking, reclining, and conversation. He used meals as teaching times. He referred to himself as water, wine, and bread. Jesus was no gnostic; he embraced the physical nature of food and drink and seems to have overjoyed himself in doing so.
Jesus earliest disciples integrated food into their Christian experience. Daily, records Luke, they were breaking bread from house to house. While they filled their stomachs, they prayed, and studied the apostles’ teaching. Arguably, food brought them together with teaching as a bonus, rather than teaching bringing them together with sandwiches along for the ride. What if we have it backwards? Should meals be as much the glue that holds fellowship together as the preaching and praying? (In a moment of candor, pastors might admit the Fifth Sunday Dinner has at least as much allure as the other four Sundays’ sermons.)
The Lord’s Supper in the early church was not a ten-minute addendum to the end of a Sunday service or a serve-yourself “Communion Snackable” of stale bread and decommissioned wine for attendees inclined to partake. The Lord’s Supper was the focal point of the Christian gathering with “the Lord” as host. It was his supper. If we observe it properly, it still is. But most don’t. Alan Streett writes in Subversive Meals, “A modern-day communion service in which a symbolic piece of cracker and a thimble-sized portion of wine are distributed to the faithful had no counterpart in the first-century church” (p 7). Perhaps our loss of connection to food and meals is related to our incomplete practice of the Lord’s Supper, producing a void in our Christian experience both deep and wide.
Having lost the Kingdom perspective of Eden’s plenty, it is little surprise we have lost the connection of the earth to farming, of farming to food production, of food production to meals, and of meals to Heaven. At each course along the way we see the temporal substituted for the eternal, exploitation rather than blessing. In his quaint memoir, The Land Remembers: A Story of a Farm and Its People, Ben Logan writes about his father’s decision to stop growing tobacco on their hilltop Wisconsin farm:
“Tobacco had been alien to us. I don’t think it had anything to do with whether or not is was right to smoke—Father liked a good cigar. But it may have had something to do with a larger, more subtle morality. Other crops completed the cycle from growth to new growth with enough of the crop going back to the land in manure or waste to see the soil healthy. Other crops worked with the land, building it. Tobacco used up the land.” (p 26)
Like Logan’s perception of tobacco, the Fall in every way uses up food and mealtime leaving depletion rather than meaning behind. There is indeed a morality in play—perhaps not so subtle.
Preparation, appreciation, taste, fellowship, conversation, laughter, and aromas remind us of the blessings of God and the fellowship he offers. The way many of us in the West eat and experience meals no longer reflects this. We often treat meals as a necessary, but unwanted intrusion into our otherwise productive lives. Fast food culture diminishes the importance of slowing down to savor what is before us, urban and suburban living and “invented, packaged food” removes from many Christians the mystery of planting, praying, growing, and harvesting. Technology distracts us when we are together for meals, fragmenting what should be a holy experience. In some parts of the world, agriculture is suffering due to unfavorable growing conditions (attributed in some cases to a changing climate) leaving residents with an uncertain future. Poverty makes it near impossible for many to afford good food, forcing choices between varying degrees of nutritional lack.
What I hope to explore in this book is whether many Christians have lost the connection between meals and the Kingdom of God, whether our physical bodies have become in some ways detached from our spiritual lives, forming a sort of accidental gnosticism. We don’t deny the reality of the physical, but we distance it from the spiritual in ways that harm both. This is true especially where food, eating, and meals are involved. This book is my attempt to recover a biblically-informed appreciation for food and meals and to help us better celebrate in them the good God who provides both so that our next supper is different than our last one.
fides quaerens intellectum
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