Food for Thought: Eating with Understanding
Commentary by Walter Hesford | FāVS News
When my mother finally sat down at the kitchen table to partake of the food she had cooked, she often found that my father, brother and I were already half-way through supper. “Eat mit Verstunt!” she would exclaim, drawing on the German spoken in her childhood home.
In English, that’s eat “with understanding.” My mother was urging us to slow down, to chew more deliberately — or at least to have the decency not to finish our meal before she who had prepared it could enjoy it too.
Jews and Food
I was reminded of how we ate by Hyphen Parent’s response to the question, “Are Jewish dietary laws outdated?” in her FāVS’ Ask a Jew column.
“Being aware and knowledgeable about our food is never outdated,” writes Hyphen Parent.
Of course the knowledge that Hyphen Parent brings to her food is much deeper than the understanding that my mother was calling for. Consider, for example, the knowledge brought to the consumption of meat in Jewish tradition.
“For meat to be Kosher, the slaughter of the animal must be as quick and painless as possible,” Parent wrote. “Concern for living creatures is rooted in empathy and Torah and will never be outdated.”
Christians and Food
Many Christians do not follow the dietary laws set forth in Torah (the first five books of the Bible). According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus graphically challenges the purpose of these laws, saying “there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that can come out are what defile” (7.14 NRSV).
In case his audience didn’t get Jesus’ agenda, Mark adds, “Thus he declared all foods clean” (7.19 NRSV). The broader agenda of Jesus and Mark is to open up the gospel to Gentiles, who traditionally ate “unclean” food such as meat from the pigs they raised.
Luke’s Book of Acts also reveals this agenda when Peter, who had resisted the spreading of the gospel to non-Jews, has a vision in which he sees “something like a large sheet coming down [from heaven]….In it were all kinds of four footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, ‘Get up, Peter, kill and eat.’ But Peter said, ‘By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean. The voice said to him again, … ‘What God has made clean, you must not call unclean’” (10.11-15 NRSV).
Just as no food is unclean, so no people are unclean — all are deserving of the gospel.
Though in Christian tradition all food may be eaten, we, like all people, should still eat with personal, environmental and religious understanding. We should do this especially now when the world is threatened by the overconsumption of the privileged, while many of the world’s poor starve.
‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’
Michael Pollan and Wendell Berry are two authors who promote this understanding. Pollan, in his 2009 “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”critiques the slaughtering of animals, the abuse the land and the abuse of our health that characterizes industrial agriculture. Humans are omnivores, notes Pollan, and our “dilemma” is that we can choose what to eat. How do we make good choices for ourselves and our world?
Pollan quotes Berry’s assertion, ‘’Eating is an agricultural act,’ then adds “It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. … [H]ow and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world. To eat with fuller consciousness of all that is stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction.”
Pollan’s conclusion to his book is sacramental: “We eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we’re eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.”
‘The Pleasures of Eating’
This echoes the conclusion to Wendell Berry’s 1989 essay, “The Pleasures of Eating.”
“Eating with the fullest pleasure … is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection to 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 do not comprehend.”
For personal, environmental or religious reasons, some will chose to become vegans or vegetarians. Some, like Berry and Pollan, will continue to eat meat from animals, as long as they are raised by local farmers who respect them.
Still others will be less concerned with what people eat than with everyone having something to eat — their “daily bread.” Those who share these concerns can support organizations like Bread for the World and Heifer International. To eat with understanding we must care for the welfare of everyone.
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. FāVS News values diverse perspectives and thoughtful analysis on matters of faith and spirituality.
