by Aaron Nicholson

If, as Len has already argued in a previous post, “The whole world is God's household,” and the economy of our world is inextricably linked to the ecology of our world, then it would seem appropriate to focus the ecological concerns within our understanding of the Kingdom and hone in on questions of agriculture.  After all, if we believe that creation is not a great cosmic accident but the careful work of the Creator, then Christians, by implication are to value it, affirming its goodness as declared by God.  Such a realization should not only cause the Christian to rethink her place within the created world, but also affect every aspect of her life—including what he or she eats.  The question at the heart of this post is simply: If we reject the dualistic theology that excludes the created world from the Kingdom and we affirm that creation matters, that our bodies matter, and acknowledge God as the ultimate Source of our food, then how should we understand food through a creational and ethical lens?  This question is not simply one of ivory-tower theology, as it is at the heart of several pressing issues in the world today.  With a world food crisis, famine, increasing GMO technology, ethanol, eating disorders, and fast food—the world is starving for a redeemed relationship with food.

Eating is not only a significant aspect of life; it is an inescapable reality.  Simply put, to eat is to live; to not eat is to die.  Indeed, all forms of life, human or otherwise, are dependent upon food for survival.  In fact, it has been said that, “The whole of nature. . . is a conjugation of  the verb to eat in the active and  passive.”   While this truth is both apparent and unavoidable, it speaks primarily to a limited view of food—that is, food’s biological function.  Most would agree that food is not simply to be understood as nourishment, but as an activity that speaks to and draws upon all aspects of life, culture, and community.  But even these added dimensions to our understanding of food are not enough.  We must go further and acknowledge that while eating should be seen as an activity relating to all of the aspects of life mentioned above, eating is not simply a physical activity, but a spiritual one—an activity in which a specific theology is embodied.  Michael Pollan hints at this point in his bestselling book, In Defense of Food:

…historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.

Food cannot be restricted to mere biology, but must be understood to have spiritual significance.  After all, as Christians we do not simply see the farm, the soil, or the greenhouse (or, dare I say the grocery store?) as the source of our food; rather we understand our food to be a gift from God—an act of grace and providence toward humanity.  Psalm 104 affirms this reality: “You cause the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for people to use, to bring forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart.”
 

If food is from God and is given to humanity as an act of grace, it should be understood and received as a gift.  In our modern society with the rise of fast food, convenience foods, calorie-counting, GMO, and eating disorders, we have not received food as gift and we have adopted a utilitarian relationship with our food.  Food, as a gift, then, that should not be taken for granted; rather it should be valued and worked for.
Those who have experienced true hunger or famine know the value of food.  However, those of us who have grown up in the affluence of the west have not experienced a lack of food and, therefore, do not truly understand the value of food.  As a result, we have seen food as nothing more than its caloric value or its ability to chase away hunger, which has led to two opposite dysfunctions.  On the one hand, the fad diets, calorie counting, and diet foods are the driving force behind the utilitarian mindset of the health-crazed populations.  In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver writes:

What the fad diets don't offer, though is any sense of national and biological integrity.  A food culture is not something that gets sold to people.  It arises out of a place, a soil, a climate, a history, a temperament, a collective sense of belonging.  Every set of fad-diet rules is essentially framed in the negative, dictating what you must give up.  Together they've helped us form powerfully negative associations with the very act of eating.  Our most celebrated models of beauty are starved people.  But we're still an animal that must eat to live.  To paraphrase a famous campaign slogan: it's the biology, stupid.  A food culture of anti-eating is worse than useless.

On the other hand, however, those who consume simply for personal pleasure with little acknowledgement of the value of food have catapulted the success of convenience foods, fast food, and junk food, and have contributed to the rapidly growing rate of obesity in North America.  What we are left with, then, are two opposing sides of the same coin—the one is health-crazed and the other unhealthy and overweight—yet both have not appropriately understood food as gift and, as a result, have not valued it.  This is seen simply in what Pollan writes:  
 

For the majority of Americans, spending more for better food is less a matter of ability than priority.  We spend a smaller percentage of our income on food than any other industrialized society; surely if we decided that the quality of our food mattered, we could afford to spend a few more dollars on it a week—and eat a little less of it.
 

One of the reasons why we have paid less for our food, eaten more of it, and valued it less is due to the rising disconnect between the provider and the consumer, resulting not only in a loss of the knowledge of our source of food, but in the work necessary for to bring it from seed to table.  Because food production is labourious, we have sought to cut corners in recent years, moving toward factory farming, GMO crops, and processed foods, in order that the work necessary to produce food would be minimized, or eliminated all together and delegated to machines.  The problem is, however, that with this shift away from the farm as the direct source of food comes a lower quality of food and—understandably—a lower cost for the consumer.  Wendell Berry asks:
 

But is work something that we have a right to escape?  And can we escape it with impunity?  We are probably the first entire people ever to think so.  All the ancient wisdom that has come down to us counsels otherwise.  It tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom.  We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis—only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.
 

Because we have tried to escape the work required of us, we have, as Berry aptly put, forsworn, “love and excellence, health and joy.”  The disconnect between the land and the table has also encouraged utilitarian eating in our culture, as it has removed the sense of enjoyment that God intended to be part of the eating experience.  Pollan writes of a study that investigated this very thing:  “In one experiment, he showed the words ‘chocolate cake’ to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. ‘Guilt’ was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of the French eaters to the same prompt: ‘celebration.’”   Because of our so-called ‘nutritionism’ we have entirely lost the pleasures of eating—the tastes, the sights, the smells, the textures, and the overall communal experience that eating was meant to be—and reduced it to a fast experience of refueling the body laden with guilt.  It is true that food is meant to be understood as a gift—one that is to be enjoyed.  After all, the final hope of the Christian is spoken of as a feast; part of God’s blessing toward Adam and Eve is in their freedom to eat of anything in the garden, apart from one tree; and Jesus himself places great significance on the eating experience as seen in his desire to feed the 5000 people gathered, his intentionality of meeting with his disciples for the last time over the Passover meal, and his invitation for the disciples to come have breakfast after he had been resurrected from the dead.  This is what Capon is getting at in his forthright manner, writing, “Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and the love them for what they are.  That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God’s image for nothing.”   We, then, are to accept God’s gift of food to us for what it is—nourishment for our bodies that is both beautiful to the eye and full of flavour for the taste buds and, ultimately a reflection of God’s creative goodness toward humanity.
 

Feeling somewhat overwhelmed, it is difficult to know exactly where to go next.  It is safe to say, however, that much needs to change—even if only one thing at a time.  As a culture, I believe we need to return to a proper relationship with the source of our food: the farm.  Until we are properly connected with the land and know the value of real food, we are always going to be prone to accept the cheaper and lower quality food that requires little from us.  This could be as simple as planting a garden in one’s backyard or shopping at the local farmers’ market rather than the grocery store.  Furthermore, we must reconnect ourselves with the True Source of our food: the Creator.   We must remember that our food comes from God and is reflective of his goodness toward humankind.  This should not only cause us to receive the food as gift with gratitude, but to also delight in God’s goodness toward us and cause us to desire Him more.  Fr. Alexander Schmemann writes:
 

Man is a hungry being.  But he is hungry for God.  Behind all the hunger of our life is God.  All desire is finally a desire for Him.  To be sure, man is not the only hungry being.  All that exists lives by “eating.”  The whole creation depends on food.  But the unique position of man in the universe is that he alone is to bless God for the food and the life he receives from Him.  He alone is to respond to God’s blessing with his blessing.
 

When we have restored our understanding of food as a gift from God, we will no longer be interested in settling for the cheap imitation.  We will long for its fullest taste, and for food in its purest form.  We will also long to be a participant in the miracle of sowing and reaping, and thus will be more deeply connected to the food we eat and to the One who has provided it for us.  It is only then that we will be able to eat with true pleasure.  Berry writes:  
 

Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.
 

Indeed, to eat is not simply to engage in mere biology; it is much more.  To eat is to participate in a mystery that is Divine—a mystery that is in the creation, the sowing, growing, reaping, cooking, eating, nourishing, thanking, and the blessing.  This, then, is one small—but significant way—that Christians should be participating in the work of our prayers as we long for the Kingdom to come.  To approach the table in such a way means to engage in the work of redeeming our relationship with food as a part of the larger work of the redemption of the whole of creation.