Every Table is the Lord's by Ryan Tindall

Humans are fundamentally eaters. And yet today, we as a culture give less thought to how we eat than perhaps at any time before in human history. We fail to answer the fundamental question of why we eat—that is, beyond the simple biological necessity—and instead make frequent trips to grocery stores and restaurants without answering or even thinking about these questions. Is this what Jesus pointed us towards when he told his disciples:

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”

Of course not. But, as is often the case in our Christ-haunted modern world, we have unwittingly and unintentionally done exactly what Jesus prescribed. Ironically though, we’ve accomplished this in a way that is the opposite of what Jesus intended when he preached to a world that encountered food scarcity in ways of which we cannot dream. Besides Jesus’ comforting admonition and Paul’s suggestion that whether we eat or drink, we should do all to the glory of God—as well as a few hair-shirted medieval saints who were more experienced than us in fasting—do we really think scripture and the Christian tradition have much to say about question, “how should we eat?”

Norman Wirzba, Professor of Theology at Duke Divinity, does. As both a theologian and agrarian, Wirzba wrote Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating. I’ve read Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan along these lines before. But Wirzba’s essential book explicitly ties what these writers and others like them have written to an expressly Christian theology, and in the process contributes to a Christian ecology and anthropology that seeks to see eating as fundamentally communal—trinitarian even—and in a way that breaks down the divides between human and human, human and animal, and human and nature, all of which starkly mark our modern condition.

Eating and the choices we make around eating communicate what we believe about the world. Eating is one of the fundamental ways that we take in and learn about the world. Our experience at the grocery store, novel as this experience is in human history, displays this—as we seek out brands which align with our values in order to consume the messaging they provide. We eat as consumers, essentially divorced—and Wirzba means divorced when he uses this word—from what we eat and those who provide it. 

The alternative Wirzba points to is an eating life marked by fidelity and love. Do we care for cows and chickens as living beings with dignity, animals like ourselves? Or do we treat them as meat-producing machines, subject to wonton destruction? Love seeks the good of the beloved and sees everything around us as grace and gift, but to be divorced from the land, from animals, and from each other is to live in a state that is “fundamentally about securing one’s own needs and advantage” (23), a state of the war of all against all. 

Self-centered eating, “divorced” eating, is then ultimately death—death to our air, water, and earth, undignified death to our animals, and death to ourselves among a plague of eating disorders and obesity. Wirzba’s understanding of food points to the interconnectedness of all these deaths as the product of our infidelity and divorce. This kind of death is only destruction, the kind which is, in Paul’s words, the wages of sin. But death is also part of eating faithfully: plants and animals must still die for us to eat and survive. This is precisely where eating is fundamentally eucharistic. When we partake of the eucharist, “take, eat, this is my body, broken for you,” we physically take Christ into us and his life becomes our nourishment and sustenance. To eat is to incarnate and resurrect the life of what you eat. In partaking of Christ, we become part of his life in this world. The protein and carbohydrates you take in become the building blocks and energy of your life. Faithful eating does not eliminate death. Faithful eating recognizes the trinitarian nature of life—the mutual indwelling and perichoresis that God and all life participate in—as well as the gracious necessity of resurrection. The life of what we eat is reborn in us, much in the same way that Jesus lives in us through the Eucharist. 

How we eat is also fundamentally about justice: justice to ourselves, to our neighbors, to farmers, and to the poor. Obesity and unhealthful food are a unique threat to the poor, as these are the foods that are often the cheapest. The lack of fresh, healthy food is a particularly sad threat to the rural poor, who may find mass-produced, nutrient-lacking food as the cheapest and most convenient option, a tragic circumstance in a part of the country which one would think would be defined by its proximity to farms. 

Living with the land and what it provides not only cares for the land, but it cares for the larger environment. Seeing our grocery stores easily stocked with summer berries, peaches, and corn in the middle of winter hides a heavy transportation price behind them, as we haul produce from the southern hemisphere to the northern. Indutrial farming, to produce the abundance of food necessary to keep prices as low as we would like, requires pesticides that are harmful to our bodies and the earth. It also requires labor so cheap it can only come from the migrant, just as it once had to come from the slave. The life of Christ in us can hardly ignore the plight of these. Christ cannot be paired with exploitation. Industrial farming also decreases food diversity, leading to depleted soil and a deficient diet. Our current circumstances show the truth in what Wirzba says of the tenuousness of our situation: “When the world is sown in only one or two crops, we are only one pest or disease away from total food disaster.”

What then is the answer? Scripture points us in a direction here, as it shows both the first man and last man in a garden. Gardening teaches us our interdependence with all things and produces humility. It forces us to be attentive, if we are to be successful, and creates a fundamental sense of membership with the earth and our fellow gardeners. We do not all need to be gardeners, but we should all be involved with our food, supporting local farms and farming. Wirzba even makes the striking claim that contempt for farms and farming is a refusal to engage with humanity’s vocation, placed as we are within this garden world (308). 

Scripture also points us in the direction of Christ’s life on earth: our eating life should be marked by common meals and hospitality. The dinner table should be a place of reconciliation and communion. Meals should be met with wonder and thanksgiving—which would make saying grace, praying a benediction over the food, a time of authentic expression rather than rote practice. This should bring renewal to our sensory life, as we experience taste, smell, and touch in communion with God. However, this is not the only side to the redemption of food this side of paradise. This is because, eucharistic eating also requires sacrifice. The Eucharist remembers that sacrifice. Our eating life should be marked by sacrifice also—sacrificing our money to purchase food that is ethically-produced, sacrificing selfish eating, and sacrificing gluttonous eating, including the gluttony of being overly delicate about what we eat. 

Food and Faith is a practical and radical book. To engage with it is to bring attentiveness and care to what we eat. It is to learn to eat sacramentally, from a perspective of wonder and grace. To engage with this book is to begin realize that every table is the Lord’s.

CCSL_BlogBio_RTindall-01.jpg

Do you have a reflection to share? We would love to feature creations from other parishioners - writing, art, music, photography, etc. - here on the Cathedral blog. Email your submission for review to communications@ccslorlando.org