When one of our neighbors died recently, my heart broke. It broke for Darrell, who would now have to manage without his life’s partner, Cosetta. It broke for our neighborhood because we would no longer see them chatting with neighbors on their evening strolls. The reminder of our frailty and mortality is often too hard to bear.
When I heard the news, I struggled with what to say to Darrell. I wrote a card to express my condolences, but I also wanted to bring him some food. I hoped the cake would say, better and more viscerally, what I yearned to say in words. To offer food is to say, “You are in my heart. You are welcome in my home. I want you to be well. You are not alone.”
Could our negligence with food be intimately connected to a broader negligence with neighborhoods, communities — even Earth itself?
Of course, we don’t yearn to speak this way only at the death of loved ones. Celebrations of all kinds – births, weddings, graduations and birthdays – seem to demand the presence of food. Lots of it. In all its splendid variety. We feast to celebrate another’s life, and there is hardly a better way to do that than by preparing and sharing the most delicious dishes we can muster. Life is meant to be delectable, something to savor and share with one another. That is why food shows up whenever we want to cherish, nurture and celebrate life.
Given the profound role that food plays in healthy cultures across the globe, why have so many of us settled for characterizing food as little more than fuel, something to acquire as cheaply and conveniently as possible and then consume quickly and mindlessly? Many people seem to find that food has become a bother, and so relatively few people have much interest or skill in gathering, growing, cooking and sharing it. Too many of us eat alone, at our desks or on the run. Could our negligence with food be intimately connected to a broader negligence with neighborhoods, communities, even Earth itself?
Several years ago, when I first started working on Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating, friends and colleagues expressed some suspicion. Are there not more important theological topics than food? I asked them to notice where and how often food shows up in Scripture and then reflect on what its regular appearance communicates about God and the life God creates, loves and daily sustains.
To hunger is to know that we depend on others to meet our needs for nurture and companionship.
We should be astounded, humbled and perhaps even terrified by the fact that God created a world in which every creature needs to eat to live. Why? Because for one creature to eat, another must die, often by being eaten. This frightening realization is lost on many of us because we have become so insulated from the realities of plant and animal death. But for most of humanity’s history, people have simply understood that death is not an accident of life; it is a steadfast accomplice as the very means of life. Wouldn’t life be better if we never had to eat and thus could avoid all this death?
I sometimes think that our attitudes about food reflect a basic discomfort with our creaturely need: the fact that we regularly experience hunger. To hunger is to know that we are not self-sufficient or invulnerable. To hunger is to know that we depend on others to meet our needs for nurture and companionship.
Scripture affirms this wide-ranging hunger from the beginning. Why? Because meeting creaturely hunger and need makes love possible and necessary. The creation of the world is also the creation of food as the original and abiding nutritious means whereby God communicates, “You are in my heart. You are welcome in my home. I want you to be well. You are not alone.” Providing food is God’s vast declaration of love. It is the visceral and delicious statement that God is always Emmanuel, God-with-us in the most practical and daily manner possible: that is, every time we eat.
As theologians reflect on the creation of the world, they often wonder why God created anything at all. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, created from nothing, teaches that God did not need to create anything because the divine life is perfect in itself. The fact that God did create must indicate an overflowing love that delights in the existence of something other than God. For good reason, the early church father John of Damascus said that we can characterize the creation of the world as a lavish act of hospitality in which God makes room for something other than God to exist and then invites this other to commune and be nurtured by God, the generous and gracious host of all life.
If we approach food from this creaturely perspective, then we can clearly see how egregious it is to define food merely as fuel. Food is not a commodity or a bundle of calories that exists to keep our machine-like bodies moving. Instead, food is God’s love made nutritious and delicious. To eat is to acknowledge our need for God, our need for each other and our need for the gifts of other creatures who nourish and amaze us. To eat is to receive and enjoy God’s love. When we gather, grow, prepare and share food with one another, we participate in God’s cherishing, nurturing, accompanying and celebrating ways with the world.
If we approach food from this creaturely perspective, then we can clearly see how egregious it is to define food merely as fuel. Food is not a commodity or a bundle of calories that exists to keep our machine-like bodies moving. Instead, food is God’s love made nutritious and delicious. To eat is to acknowledge our need for God, our need for each other and our need for the gifts of other creatures who nourish and amaze us. To eat is to receive and enjoy God’s love. When we gather, grow, prepare and share food with one another, we participate in God’s cherishing, nurturing, accompanying and celebrating ways with the world.
When we appreciate that food is God’s original, abiding and intimate communication of love for us, we can also appreciate why God becomes so angry when people are starving or even dying from hunger. God has created a world of abundance. There is more than enough food to feed every person on Earth, even with today’s roughly 8 billion inhabitants. The problem isn’t the lack of food. It is the unjust political and economic structures that often treat food (and the land and waters from which it comes) as a weapon or a commodity to be profited from rather than a gift to be generously shared.
Roughly one in five children in America are food insecure, meaning they do not have consistent access to the food that can meet their nutritional needs. Nearly 50 million Americans face daily challenges with hunger. Around the world, as many as 2 billion people worry about having enough to eat, while over 600 million are chronically undernourished. This hunger is inexcusable. All this needless suffering reflects our abdication of God’s primordial command that we first take care of one another and our garden before all else.
My claim that food is God’s love made nutritious and delicious becomes even more arresting when we consider that in the flesh of Jesus, God becomes our food. In the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, we see Jesus miraculously feeding 5,000 people through the simple act of blessing the food a boy brought with him. The boy didn’t bring food only for himself. I like to think that the mother packed enough for him to share with others. Jesus saw this sharing love and multiplied it so that all could have more than enough.
The people who witnessed this miracle were more than satisfied. They were thrilled. They wanted to make Jesus their king and thus never to worry about being hungry again. This moment is when Jesus shocked them by saying that he is the “bread of life,” explaining that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood if they want to experience eternal life — the life that really is life.
Jesus seemed to think that if we eat and drink him, his compassionate way of living will take root within us and empower us from within at a most elemental, gustatory level.
Jesus’s self-designation as our most essential food was shocking, even repulsive, to those who heard it. What could it possibly mean to eat God?
Jesus was well aware that people can be negligent with one another, even cruel and unforgiving with the people we need most. Our perennial temptation is to forego the care and nurture of one another that God demonstrates and has called us into from the beginning. As Jesus saw it, people need to be inwardly and viscerally transformed to learn to live in his compassionate and life-giving, life-nurturing ways. It isn’t enough to think or speak differently. We need to live differently, and to do so we need to be properly fed and formed. Jesus seemed to think that if we eat and drink him, his compassionate way of living will take root within us and empower us from within at a most elemental, gustatory level.
To eat Jesus’s flesh and drink his blood is, therefore, to want the nurturing that puts our lives on a new footing. It is to want Jesus’s way of living to become our own. Jesus’s kind of food is not a commodity produced to make a private profit. His food is for “the life of the world” (John 6:51). When we come to the Eucharistic table, we are asking to become the community that is called the body of Christ: a community in which members are so attuned to one another that when one suffers or rejoices, all suffer and rejoice together.
Acts tells us that the early Christians, after receiving the Holy Spirit, devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and prayer. They also committed to having regular fellowship and to eating with one another. As Acts describes, “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved” (Acts 2:44-47). As the community grew, the needs surely grew as well. Even so, the practice of eating and being together was such that there was “not a needy person among them” (Acts 4:34).
Imagine being in a community where each person commits to caring for and nurturing of the others. Such a community is impossible if people do not first know each other well. As the history of the early church shows, one of the best ways this knowledge grows is by eating together regularly, all in the name of Jesus.
When I look back on the church community that raised me, I have great difficulty remembering a single sermon. What sticks in my mind is the fact that we ate together a lot. I remember the strudels and tortes, my mom’s roasted chicken and my grandma’s egg salad. I remember people sitting around tables, telling stories, reminiscing about the past, sharing hopes and dreams, and also troubles and worries. A lot of important ministry was happening then and there, ministry that simply would not have been possible if we only sat in pews for an hour one day a week.
Loving one another and meeting one another’s needs takes a lot of unhurried time. Trust needs to be built before people will share what their needs and hungers even are. There is no better place for this love and trust to grow than at a kitchen, dining or Eucharistic table. Eating together is our most powerful and practical task if we want to address the suspicion driving so much of the polarization of our time — and the loneliness that infects today’s anxious generation.
The growth, harvesting, cooking and sharing of food have always been at the center of our shared life because eating is the means of life. When we eat, how we eat and with whom we eat are daily invitations to witness to God as the One who provides for us and desires that we experience life in all its delectable variety and freshness. It is our regular opportunity, as the psalmist says, to “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8).
