“Food connects us to nature, to ourselves, to the future. It must never be taken lightly. Everything we eat is either developing us or destroying us. When we chose what we eat, it is an act of creation second only to the conception of life.”
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Food for Thought
Food has become a subject of headlines and we who have never given much thought to the complexity of this topic are beginning to understand the ethics of eating. As such issues of hunger, health, environment, justice, and globalization come to the table with us, we are now hearing the call to claim a theology of eating. This certainly could be the focus of many blog postings, so I offer this thought from author and theologian, Joan Chittister, as a beginning point:
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This certainly could be the focus of many blog postings, so I offer this thought from author and theologian, Joan Chittister, as a beginning point:
�Food connects us to nature, to ourselves, to the future. It must never be taken lightly. Everything we eat is either developing us or destroying us. When we choose what we eat, it is an act of creation second only to the conception of life.�
I would understand J. Chittister's premise of "act of creation second only to the conception of life" more fully if we could infer that her position stems from the standpoint of creating and taking life as opposed to what I surmise is her origin of "you are what you eat". Her thrust seems to be that we either build or destoy ourselves and not that our act of eating is the result of a lives lost every time. If humans concieved life several times each day (most of which would be eaten by another life form)along with our taking several lives each day by eating, I could almost let her comment slide.
She seems to be more keenly aware of our nourishing ourselves properly being an act of creation than she is aware that our eating is the direct result of taking many lives each day. She needs to get a grip on the idea that whatever species, especially a sentient one, is the apex predator on a planet, that species (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) has an obligation not to eat itself out of existence, and that the very fact that we can "choose" what we eat is the direct result of having too much. Do not confuse choosing steak over french fries with freewill.
Our bodies are not metaphoric temples because sacrificed plants and animals are laid at our altar but because God is supposed to live in us. Our act of building better temples by eating daily bread is about as close as I am willing to venture that chosing food is an act of creation that is not self serving and survival driven.
She pens a good line, and she almost had me believing that we have the divine right to destroy our planet by making me believe that food choices are tantamount to creation for the one species that can choose. If she really believes that food connects us with our future, then why did she not mention the interconnectivity of the past. What and how we ate in the past determined what we are now. Much of what we ate in the past is no longer alive on the planet in its original form. Will we become something else if we eat else in the future? Will we eat the newly created else until we finally conceive else? Do we need to become else to become fully human?
Maybe she meant to say the following:
"When we choose to think with the mind of God, it is an act of creation second only to the conception of life.�
Tom
OK. I thought I had vented enough, but, obviously, this whole global eating disorder phase of human learning has gripped me with gripe and grippe. I have stuffed myself so full of information for which I thought I was starving and of which I need to expell from the gut that I am starting to feel the onset of verbal bulemia.
Joyously would I welcome a theology of eating. A full blown doctrine of divinely inspired guidelines for showing us how, what and why to eat could really spur us on to greater insights into many other areas of human spiritual failure and could certainly take some of the pressure off of our already guilt ridden society. Joyously would I welcome it if it were complete, that is.
The complexity of a theology of eating can not address only the issue of food. We eat because we have a voracious, omnivorous appetite. Omnivorous, as it applies to humans, entails far more than merely plants and animals. Human omnivores have also developed appetites for luxury, leisure, power and greed. Sadly, humans have thought no further than to use natural resources of plants, animals, minerals, metals, gas, oil,land and water (to name a few) to feed these appetites.
Modern humans are not just eating food. They are eating the planet, the garden, the birthright, the covenant the mother. Any effective theology for setting guidelines must, therefore, be a THEOLOGY OF APPETITE.
This theology of appetite would need to express all the plausible reasons why God would want us to suppress an appetite. Some of them are frightening when not poo-pooed as farfetched.
Several reasons have become obvious to me over the years, but the one that was most persistent when I was young is the one that still rings of truth. When I was a kid, I had a best friend. We entertained ourselves in a town of 200 people by playing games that needed no space, board or pieces. That way we could play them while escaping town on our bicycles that we were both sure that God had sent for that express purpose. I have thanked God for that bicycle everyday of my life since. I admit that ocassionally it was just, "Thank God I got this bike". I have thanked God every day for that friend,too, although, God took him to play with Him when we were still bike riding age.
One of the games was "Boticelli". Another was a version of "I Spy". The favorite was "Imagine". One person starts off with a statement like, "Imagine that a space ship is travelling from an electron to a proton". The other person responds with a scenario that fits the parameters of all that has been said and passes the story on. The trick is that as the story gets more complex, every addition to it must conform to the truth of all that has been said before.FUN.
One day while pedalling and playing "Imagine", my friend said an astonishingly relevatory "What if..." that caused us to stop the bikes and give it our total attention. We both recognized the moment as life changing. He said, "What if oil is the blood of the Earth?"
We quickly ran the game to a point where it made sense to us that all the minerals and metals and oil and ores and magma and atmosphere collectively were responsible for maintaining magnetic North, and without them in sufficient quantities in their original locations, the poles could flip, reverse polarity and change the entire electromagnetic character of the planet. That child game scenario makes just as much sense to me 50 years later. I have been waiting apprehensively for many years for us to use up too much Earthblood or something that would catapult us into a global catastrophe, and I have located the source of the danger. I have isolated it. I am guilty of it.It is our appetite for more than our daily bread. I would welcome a theology of eating.
Tom
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