yearofplenty

Graham Crackers, Corn Flakes, and Other Echoes of Christian Food Ethics

The most interesting section in Theology on the Menu, thus far, is the review of early U.S. history where Christian leaders were on the forefront of the healthy food movements. The authors highlight the religious justifications for 19th century justifications for vegetarianism, whole foods diets, and healthy eating.

For example Dr Sylvester Graham was a Presbyterian minister who spoke out against the delitorious effects of white bread and advocated for breads made from whole grains. He came up with his own healthy flour mix made with whole-wheat flour, bran, and wheat germ from which he developed the well known cracker that bears his name. Along with being healthy he claimed that the dryness of Graham Crackers curbed sexual urges, both of which modern civilization has counteracted by adding chocolate and marshmallows to make S'mores.

In another example of the strong historic connection between early health food movements and Christian faith the book highlights the development of corn flakes. John Harvey Kellogg was the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitortium, health center and headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventists who were strong advocates of vegeterianism. This close relationship gave birth to Kellog's breakfast cereals and the iconic corn flakes. Once again, modern America has taken this historic holy urge for health and added lots of sugar to transform them into Frosted Flakes. 

These are just two examples of many that point to the strong religious roots of modern food movements, but that really shouldn't be a surprise. Many secular food passions have an implicit, if not explicit, spiritual vibe. From vegans to raw foodites, to localists and bacon evangelists, there is something more going on than just calorie counts and fat content. These dietary regimens point to a way of life and possess hints of the meaning of it all.

What Happened to Christian Food Practices?

I'm in the reading and studying phase of my sabbatical and one the my questions as I approach the reading is, "What happened to Christian food practices?"

Food is a prominent topic in the Bible and through much of church history but food seems to play a minor role in the lived faith of the Western Church, in great contrast to a secular culture that has passionately embraced food practices. My ultimate question relates to how the modern expressions of the church might embrace food practices but before I get to that I'm simply wondering what happened. Why is there such an absence of practical guidance around food as an expression of faith in today's church.

The best book so far in my research is Theology on the Menu: Asceticism, Meat and Christian Diet by Grumet and Muers. It's a scholarly work with original research that describes the history of food practices in the church.

Here are some choice quotes and observations from this book thus far:

• Referencing Clement of Alexandria's attitude toward food in his work on Christian ethics, The Instructor, "Among the skills of cookery, Clement singles out for special criticism the 'useless art of making pastry' which, he contends, vitiates the tastebuds and imperils moral discretion. Based on my experience with doughnuts I think he might have a point. 
  
  
• Benedict's Rule offers a more positive attitude toward food. According to the Rule the cellarer is required to "look on all the monastery's cooking utensils 'as upon the sacred vessels of the altar." 
  
  
• As a Protestant I was surprised to read about Calvin's argument that the Lenten fast was not "divinely inaugurated" and that Jesus' 40 days of fasting at the beginning of his ministry was not a model for followers to emulate during the 40 days of Lent. According to Calvin, "It was therefore merely fasle zeal, replete with superstition, which set up a fast under the title and pretext of imitating Christ."(p. 30-31)
  
  The book points out that the Reformation did not automatically lead to the end of fasting and food rules in the Protestant expressions of the church, but Calvin and others planted the seeds of suspicion that continue to shape the Protestant attitude toward fasting. 
  
  
• One line of argument they make in the book that I find especially intriguing is that certain rhythms of food practices, especially the Lenten fast, arose out of the context of the rhythms of nature. For example, during the late winter and early spring when meat was most scarce they abstained from meat as part of the regimen of Lent. It was seasonal eating incorporated into the church calendar and Christian conscience.
  
  The authors highlight this perspective as a neglected approach to the topic that deserves more attention, and I agree.
  
  
• In their chronicling of the early church the authors highlight the debates about sex and food. Many argued that lust was the source of all sin, but there were many who posited that gluttony was the granddaddy of all vices. Gregory the great argued that the moral path began with the "fight against gluttony" and this logic led many to conclue that fasting was the most important and valuable practice in the monastic life.
  
  A cursory glance at debates in modern churches it seems clear that sex won out over gluttony as the most important moral issue, but perhaps it would be worth returning to this debate and giving gluttony another look. I can't remember hearing the topic gluttony ever mentioned in church debates about morality and ethics.

Feel free to chime in if you have thoughts about what happened to Christian food practices. I'll share more from the reading as I progress.

The Other Pew Poll - 1 in 5 Americans Now "Unaffiliated" With Religion

While the Pew poll on the Presidential election is getting most of the recent headlines, there is another Pew poll that came out this week on religion in American that is more significant. 

According to the Pew Research Center, one in five American adults — nearly 20 percent of the US population — now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, the highest percentage ever in Pew’s polling. 

This is a 25% increase in just the last five years.

As a pastor and leader of a religious organization this poll got my attention but it doesn't shock or surprise me, rather it confirms what I have experienced and observed in my 15 years of ordained ministry. More and more people are just not that into religion. The Christian church in North America used to function under the assumption that people wanted to be involved in a church, and if they weren't currently affiliated, they were actively engaged in looking to be affiliated. Those days are gone. 

I did a funeral yesterday for a 95-year-old saint of the church. As his widow described it, when they moved to Millwood 53 years ago, "Everybody went to Millwood Presbyterian Church," so that's where they went. In the conversations after the service with people from that generation, there was both a wistful remembrance of the deep friendships and strong community connections that were forged at the church in those years, but also a frank recognition that things have changed dramatically. The Pew survey confirms what they intuitively understand, "everybody" doesn't go to church anymore.

Of the roughly 20% who are unaffiliated with a particular religion, most are not looking to find their sacred niche.

The vast majority of religiously unaffiliated Americans are not actively seeking to find a church or other religious group to join.  Of those who describe themselves as “nothing in particular” (as opposed to atheist or agnostic), 88 percent say they are not looking for a religion that is right for them.

If you're not already a little disoriented by this news, check this out. Most of these comfortably unaffiliated folks still believe in God:

Two-thirds (68 percent) of those who describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated say they believe in God or a universal spirit.  More than half (58 percent) say they often feel a deep connection with nature and the earth, and more than a third (37 percent) describe themselves as “spiritual” but not “religious.”

Anytime someone says "I'm just not into you," it's natural to ask, "Is it you or is it me?" Is this a problem with religious institutions or is it a problem with the people who are opting out?

Some of my ecclesiastical friends are pinning the blame on the growing ranks of the unaffiliated. Pastor Lillian Daniel's critique of the spiritually-but-not-religious crowd is probably the most prominent example of this approach. She writes:

On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is "spiritual but not religious." Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo....Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating.

Her critique has hit such a cathartic chord that it is on tap to become a book in 2013. As much as I appreciate Lillian, and as much as I like to bemoan the shallow, self-indulgent ethos of our culture, I don't think this is a helpful posture for leaders in the church who want to engage these current realities. It has an air of superiority to it that is likely to push even more from the ranks of the religious membership rolls.

Just imagine the billboards for the marketing campaign that national denominational offices can roll out in support of this approach: "Do you consider yourself spiritual but not religious? What a loser." or "Are you unaffiliated with a religious institution? Good! We don't want shallow, self-centered people anyway."

Instead of pointing fingers at those who are leaving, we in the church need to listen to what they are saying. There is a legitimate critique that church leaders need to grapple with if we are going to have some relevance in the future. The unaffiliated in the survey put it like this:

Overwhelmingly, they [the non-affiliated] think that religious organizations are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules and too involved in politics...

No wonder us religious folk are inclined to diminish this trend and the people who are a part of it. It's hard to look that critique in the face and not blush. 

There are some glimmers of hope for religious institutions in the midst of the growing exodus:

More than three-quarters (77 percent) say religious institutions play an important role in helping the poor and needy and bring people together and strengthen community bonds (78 percent).

These are challenging times for religious organizations like the Presbyterian church I am a part of, but also times of opportunity for innovation and change. Instead of dismissing this news I hope our congregation will respond with humility to listen and the courage to adapt and change.

Wendell Berry, the Inhabit Conference, community gardens, and the kingdom of God

Last week I had the privilege of attending the Inhabit Conference, a collaboration between the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and the Parish Collective, a network of faith leaders equipping churches to live out the gospel in their neighborhoods. It was a wonderful collection of people seeking an alternative imagination for being the church in this modern, commodified, flattened cultural moment. In a fitting convergence of events, Wendell Berry gave the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Monday. The Inhabit Conference and National Endowment for the Humanities lecture both expressed a prophetic call to reconnect with a sense of place and a responsibility to people.

The Chronicle in Higher Education had the following report on the Berry lecture:

Mr. Berry's speech was a discussion of affection and its power to bind people to community. It was also a meditation on place and those who "stick" to it—as caretakers and curators. "In affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy," Mr. Berry said.

The opposite of the "sticker"—in the words of Mr. Berry's mentor, the writer Wallace Stegner—is the "boomer," those who "pillage and run."

"That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated," Mr. Berry said. Our relationship to the land and to community is increasingly abstract and distanced.

"By economic proxies thoughtlessly given, by thoughtless consumption of goods ignorantly purchased, now we all are boomers....." 

The antidote, Mr. Berry said, is affection, connection, and a broader definition of education—to study and appreciate practical skills like the arts of "land use, life support, healing, housekeeping, homemaking."

Berry's comments echo much of what I heard at Inhabit. In the midst of the growing wreckage of "boomer" models of church in North America, people shared stories about what it looks like to be a "sticker" church that specializes in affection, connection, and homemaking. As someone who battles mightily with my boomer instincts in leading the church, the conference refreshed my vision for a different, stickier path of leadership.

Part of the gift of the conference was to help me see the blessing of the stories that have unfolded in our community over the last couple of years. (The test of a good church conference is whether you go home feeling envious of God at work in other people's stories or encouraged by God at work in your own stories. Inhabit provided me with the latter.) Many spoke of starting community gardens, so I thought I'd share part of our story here as an example of how community gardens can serve as a living alternative to the "pillage and run" pace of life.

The story of the garden goes back four decades to the start of an iconic neighborhood pumpkin patch on the shores of the Spokane river, located next to a major north-south thoroughfare in the Spokane valley. Generations of children grew up in our vicinity making a seasonal pilgrimage to the pumpkin patch to pick out the perfect pumpkin and pluck it from the vine. Not only that, they got to see the field plowed, the seeds planted, and the plants growing as their family station wagons drove by the site in the spring and summer. It was a community-sustained umbilical to the land and a constant connection to the rhythms of springtime and harvest that have been lost in most communities.

Ten years ago Spokane County set out to widen the Argonne bridge and the pumpkin patch was designated as the lay-down area for all the heavy equipment and machinery required for the year-long construction project. I was told that tractors came and shaved off the two feet of black humus that had accumulated from the years of growing pumpkins in order to level the land. After the construction was completed the land was left as a hard-packed abandoned lot that served as a turnaround area for school buses and a shortcut for people walking through the neighborhood. The land was so hard it took a pick-ax to loosen enough soil for a soil-test. 

Four years ago people in the church and in the neighborhood started a conversation about the potential of recovering the land and the story of the land by turning the site of the old pumpkin patch into a community garden. I had only known that plot of land as an abandoned lot and it was only after these conversations started that I learned its history. The loss of connection to the land is like that, we not only lose the use of the land we lose the stories that at one time gave life to the neighborhood.

We knew we couldn't do it on our own as a church so we reached out to the neighors and other community partners. The paper mill that owns the land agreed to let us use it and they even donated the water and facilitated the donation of lumber and compost through their connections. We enlisted neighbors, the school district, a local group home, scouts, local landscaping businesses as co-conspirators in reclaiming the land. We even had a bunch of guerilla gardeners from the Twitterverse that came to help us get started. We joined together and named it the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden.

I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story:

The garden has become a gathering place for families and neighbors.

One of our goals with the garden is not only to let people have a plot to use for personal use, we wanted to bring back the pumpkin patch. So along with individual raised beds we have some area for row crops for Second Harvest and a place for pumpkins. Last summer we had a bounty crop of pumpkins and invited children from a local group home to come over and choose a pumpkin. The rule was that they had to pick a pumpkin that they would carry to the car. 

Some of them pushed the rule about carrying the pumpkin to the limit. 

Others tried to find the perfect pumpkin. It took this little girl 15 minutes wandering the patch to find just the right one.

It was a wonderfully redemptive moment to see kids once again walking on this land with anticipation in their eyes and joy in their hearts about finding a pumpkin to call their own.

I imagine that when these children now drive by the pumpkin patch they remember the fruit of the land, they remember the richness of the soil, they remember the rhythms of the seasons, and the joy of the harvest. To use Berry's words they have a new sense of affection, for a land that sustains them and a community that is committed to a place, which serves as a tangible sign that they are part of a community that is committed to them. 

Along with this I think they have a better sense of God's redeeming work in the world and we in the church who have been involved with the garden have a better sense of this work as well. We better understand that the kingdom of God is not some abstract notion, it's like a community garden -- putting down roots in a place, redeeming abandoned places, and renewing affectionate relationships.

Thanks to those at the Seattle School and the Parish Collective for putting on the Inhabit Conference. It helped remind me of the God who is at work in our neighborhood.

My Take on Ethics of Eating - More grace needed in current food debates

Last week I was a panelist on an Ethics of Eating event at Sante' restaurant in downtown Spokane and today's edition of the Spokesman Review has an article on what transpired. The in-person event, pictured above, was organized in response to a heated virtual debate on Facebook over the fact that Sante' serves foie gras. You can look on the Sante' Facebook page for a run down of the debate. Local TV news even did a story on it. Here's one of the critical comments posted on Faceboook:

You will never have our business/patronage because I now know you serve foie gras. And we will never recommend your restaurant to local friends or out of town guests. In fact, we will tell them about your inhumane offerings and I'm sure they will decide the same, as our friends are all animal caring people. In your quest to serve haute' cuisine and be a Cosmo restaurant, you have shown us that you have made unethical choices to seek your customers. With many other dining options, our money will be spent elsewhere. Shame on you for putting money above the suffering of ducks and geese.

I personally really enjoyed the event, especially hearing from Jeremy and other leaders in the Spokane sustainable food community. There were not any strident critics in the audience but there were some good questions from vegans about the justification for killing animals when other alternatives are available. I explained that I find those arguments a lot more compelling than I used to, although I am not yet convinced. I appreciated that the audience expressed a genuine desire to learn about food systems and the my fellow panelists responded with a gracious desire to inform and inspire people to learn more. I guess the big surprise was that the in-person event was such a pleasant dialogue compared to the rancor and bitterness of the online lobbing of accusatory grenades. The online ethical debate around food has taken on an almost religious character, with the puritans on one side and hedonists on the other.

This is one of the reasons I have been compelled to explore actual religious traditions around food. I have suspected that the religious-like debate around food systems might actually have something to learn from actual religious food practices. We've spent the last four months following kosher food laws and Orthodox fasting rules. We celebrated the end of the Orthodox Lenten fast last Saturday with the midnight Pascha service at Holy Trinity Orthodox church. 

I plan on writing extensively about what we have been learning but there is one aspect of the Pascha service that I found especially helpful for current debates around food. In the Orthodox church the fasting rules for Lent are very strict. On most days there is no meat, no dairy, no oil, no fish, no eggs, and no alcohol. On days where there is an evening celebration of the eucharist the strict rule is that you abstain from all food and drink until receiving the communion elements at the evening service. We followed these rules closely but there is a wide range of observance in the Orthodox church, with many loosely observing the rules and many not observing them at all. One of the ethical questions around these food rules in the Orthodox church is how to deal with the diversity of practice given an ethical ideal. This is the same question that faces locavores, slow-food advocates, vegan evangelists and the rest. 

At the Pascha service I learned how they deal with this diversity of practice as they prepare to gather around tables and celebrate the Paschal feast. Their approach is summed up in their reading of the famous sermon from St. John Crysostom which opens with these words:

If any be a devout lover of God,
  let him partake with gladness from this fair and radiant feast.
If any be a faithful servant,
  let him enter rejoicing into the joy of his Lord.
If any have wearied himself with fasting,
  let him now enjoy his reward.
If any have laboured from the first hour,
  let him receive today his rightful due.
If any have come after the third,
  let him celebrate the feast with thankfulness.
If any have come after the sixth,
  let him not be in doubt, for he will suffer no loss.
If any have delayed until the ninth,
  let him not hesitate but draw near.
If any have arrived only at the eleventh,
  let him not be afraid because he comes so late.

For the Master is generous and accepts the last even as the first.
He gives rest to him who comes at the eleventh hour
  in the same was as him who has laboured from the first.
He accepts the deed, and commends the intention.

Enter then, all of you, into the joy of our Lord.
First and last, receive alike your reward.
Rich and poor, dance together.
You who fasted and you who have not fasted, rejoice together.
The table is fully laden: let all enjoy it.
The calf is fatted: let none go away hungry.

When it comes to sharing in the abundant feast of lamb that follows the Paschal service they make no distinction between those who come first and those who come last, those who fasted strictly and those who didn't fast at all. (See Jesus' parable of the workers in the vineyard for the theological background to this.) My orthodox friends model this approach throughout Lent by not talking openly about their individual fasting practices so as to avoid pride and the divisions that it cultivates. In the midst of the most strict food rules I've ever encountered they somehow manage to offer grace instead of judgment. 

The fullness of the gospel expressed in the invitation to the table at the Paschal service can't be reduced to a simple lesson, but it does offer a provocative vision of what it looks like for a community to gather around food practices, which might be helpful for food activists filled with religious zeal for their cause:

Instead of identifying all the people (or chefs) that they'll never share a meal with, how about a grace-filled invitation to gather around the feast table, seeking community and relationships, knowing that these relationships are the foundation for more ethical practice.

Instead of exalting the puritans and hurling accusations at the unfaithful, how about an acknowledgement that we are all sinners caught up in a fallen food system. 

Instead of prideful proclamations of approved practices, how about a humble stance that lifts up ideals but avoids creating a culinary class system. 

I'm glad for the face-to-face gathering at Sante' last week. It felt like a generous invitation to gather around the table in the diversity of our practices to learn and grow together. I look forward to more such conversations.

Thoughts for a New Year - Make Time, Defy Expectations, Consider Limits

I stumbled across a few articles this week that offer some helpful thoughts on the New Year.

Anne Lamott offers some good advice at Sunset Magazine where she implores us to find time for creative expression. Lamott is one of my writing inspirations. I just love her playfully profound "voice" in the written word. She sums up her writing advice, which is good advice for most things worth doing in life:

I begin with my core belief—and the foundation of almost all wisdom traditions—that there is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder. But the good news is that creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.

Then I bring up the bad news: You have to make time to do this.

Lamott's book Bird by Bird was the inspiration for me to make more time for creative expression through writing which, in part, led to the adventure of writing a book. 

She says the key is to make time:

This is what I say: First of all, no one needs to watch the news every night, unless one is married to the anchor. Otherwise, you are mostly going to learn more than you need to know about where the local fires are, and how rainy it has been: so rainy! That is half an hour, a few days a week, I tell my students. You could commit to writing one page a night, which, over a year, is most of a book.

If they have to get up early for work and can’t stay up late, I ask them if they are willing NOT to do one thing every day, that otherwise they were going to try and cram into their schedule.

Another interesting article is from a palliative care nurse reflecting on the most common regrets expressed by people who are at the end of their lives.

Number 1 on her list is that people said, "I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." She writes:

This was the most common regret of all. When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honored even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. 

It is very important to try and honor at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realize, until they no longer have it.

The last article I'll reference is one I wrote a couple months back on Steve Jobs' advice to not settle for anything less than doing what you love. It serves as a counterbalance to the advice above that is wonderful, but can degenerate into narcissism and shallow selfishness. This post was one of the most read and most shared from this blog during the last year. I wrote at the time:

The passing of Steve Jobs last week combined with the amazing current success of Apple has created a firestorm or adoration and accolades that I have been as much a part of as anyone.

I was especially moved by Steve Jobs' often referenced 2005 commencement address at Stanford in which he lays out a vision for passionately pursuing what you love in life. He says:

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

He concludes the address by saying:

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

After a week of adoring Steve Jobs and his advice to make the most of life, my attention today has turned to the Apple supply chain and the thousands of primarily Chinese low-income workers who have literally built the Apple empire. I'm struck this morning by the meaninglessness of Jobs' advice to the majority of the people who have worked to build Apple products all these years. If Jobs had delivered his Stanford commencement address to the morning work shift at one of Apple's factories in Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, or Czech Republic, how would they have responded? What kind of sense would it make in their lives to hear the admonition to not "settle." I have a hunch that the advice to "stay hungry" would confuse these workers who are all too familiar with a very different kind of hunger than the metaphorical variety Jobs was promoting....

I still appreciate the amazing design and efficiency of my apple products this morning, but I'm restless to find out more about their journey to my desk in Spokane, Washington. I'm reminded that I can't just enjoy this technology as an end-product, but there is a story that accompanies these items that is important to know about and that impacts the way I experience them. There are dozens of other hands that touched this computer in a far off place and that truth brings with it some accountability to those workers.

And I find this morning that I have a growing skepticism of Jobs' advice. None of us are superman or superwoman. We all "settle" in a thousand different ways in life. We all come up against limits -- even Steve Jobs, which he speaks to in his commencement address:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. 

That's advice that stands up better to scrutiny. It might even resonate on the Foxconn factory floor. Life is fleshed out not so much in the often narcissistic pursuit of what we love, but more so in our grappling with human limits.

I had better stop here because my preacher's voice is about to kick in with a message about how we are all like grass, but the word of the Lord endures forever. I generally try to save my sermons for Sunday mornings. :)

Photo: Saw these birds along the Centennial Trail in Spokane. Finches?

Anticipating the Christmas Feast - My CNN Article

I have an article that posted today at CNN's Belief Blog that explores what we're learning as we follow the Orthodox Nativity fast. Go here to read it.

Here's my conclusion in the article:

At minimum, it’s time for American Christians to recognize what many of their nonreligious friends have discovered – that food practices are important for the journey of spiritual formation. They are a meaningful way to connect with the mystery that underlies all of creation.

Better yet, maybe it’s time for an Orthodox moment in American Christianity where Protestants and evangelicals rediscover the generative role of fasting and feasting on the journey of following Jesus. We’ll all be better off for it, both body and soul.

Merry Christmas.

The Spirit of Food - A Book Review

The Spirit of Food: 34 Writers on Feasting and Fasting Toward God (Cascade Books, 2010) is a wonderful collection of essays by an all-star cast of gifted writers on the connections between food and Christian faith. 

The book reminds me of one of those summer food festivals that feature samplings from all the best restaurants in town. I remember growing up with the annual Bite of Seattle. We would pay an entrance fee to get in and then tent by tent we would make our way around the festival stalls, gobbling up appetizer-sized portions of gourmet mu-shoo pork tacos and blackened salmon. In the same way The Spirit of Food invites the reader in to sample the gourmet writing of Lauren Winner, Wendell Berry, Ann Voskamp, Amy Frykholm, Alexander Schmemann, Robert Farrar Capon, and Leslie Leyland Fields who edited and coordinated this event/book. Interspersed among the more well-known authors are unique perspectives from dozens of others, all organized around the themes: On the Way to the Table, In the Kitchen, The Ways We Eat, Fasting, At the Table of the Lord, and Feasting. 

Given the nature of the book I'm going to approach this review like it's a conversation in the car with a friend driving home from one of those food festivals. Let's call it "Bite of the Kingdom." 

Friend: So how did you like The Spirit of Food/Bite of the Kingdom?

Me: I don't think I've ever read so many tasty morsels of food writing. (yes, the puns are irresistable) Just when I was savoring the offerings in one chapter I was drawn to the next. They did a really good job representing different perspectives on how food intersects with faith. I like that each author was given the freedom to engage the topic from their experience. I could tell that the authors really enjoyed writing on the subject and that came through in the reading of the book.

Friend: What was your favorite chapter?

Me: I'm a sucker for Berry, Schmemann, and Capon but I'm familiar with their work so their chapters were like comfort food that is flawlessly prepared, and tasty as usual, but its familiarity makes me look elsewhere for a favorite. I really enjoyed Amy Frykholm's treatment of Orthodox fasting rituals in which she writes about her experience as an exchange student in Russia where she "witnessed a fuller understanding of the body and soul in communion." I resonate with her desire for this kind communion. Suzanne Wolfe's description of her struggle with an eating disorder was wonderfully honest and served up just the right combination of the sweet hope of hunger satisfied and the sour despair of irreconcilable hungers. 

Friend: But which was your favorite.

Me: Okay, if you're going to make me choose I'd have to say Lauren Winner's reflection on her experience with Kosher food laws as a Jew and the ways her experience with kashrut, as she calls it, might inform her foodways as a Christian. I was intrigued by her statement, "While Christians are not bound by the particularities of Deuteronominic dietary laws, we still may want to pay attention to the basic principle that underlies kashrut: God cares about our dietary choices." In summing up the provocative potential of Kosher food laws for Christians she says, "At its most basic level, keeping kosher requires you to be present to your food." She cites the "logic of kashrut" as she sketches the contours of a food ethic that includes paying attention and seasonal eating. She writes, "Food is part of God's creation. A right relationship with food points us toward him."

Her chapter really got me thinking about what other practices in the Bible and the history of the church might inform Christian approaches to food. It seems like an under-explored area in many church circles.

Friend: Yeah I enjoyed her chapter too. It sure is hard to choose a favorite.

Me: The only downside to The Spirit of Food is that you only get a small portion at each stop on the journey. Many of the chapters left me wanting a leisurely 10-course meal of reading to follow-up on the tantalizing appetizer. 

Friend: But it's nice that the authors provide a recipe to accompany each chapter. I bet you could make a nice 10-course meal from the recipes in the book. My only complaint is that their wasn't a beer garden.

I think food may be the next big topic among American Christians and The Spirit of Food is the most accessible guide yet to the potential of food to shape Christian faith, and a convincing argument that it should. It would make a great Christmas present for your foodie friends. Buy it here. 

See Eating as a Spiritual Practice: Is Food the Next Big Spiritual Discipline for American Christians for more on this trend. 

Eating as a Spiritual Practice: Is Food the Next Big Spiritual Discipline for American Christians?

Rachel Wheeler, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University has written a paper published in three installments on the Religion in American History blog arguing that the locavore trend with its farmers' markets, CSA boxes, and school gardens has established a significant foothold in the imagination of American evangelicals, citing recent books on the subject:

There is an equally voluminous output by Christian publishers, though it has gone largely un-noticed by the mainstream media. Presbyterian pastor Craig Goodwin recently published, Year of Plenty: One Suburban Family, Four Rules, and 365 Days of Homegrown Adventure in Pursuit of Christian Living, and Ragan Sutterfield, founder of a farm-school for disadvantaged youth, published a collection of essays entitled, Farming as a Spiritual Discipline. Rod Dreher, a Methodist turned Catholic turned Eastern Orthodox, has written about conservatives who embrace what are usually seen as liberal issues in his book: Crunchy Cons: Or How Birkenstock Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party); and one of my favorites, Don Colbert’s, What Would Jesus Eat?

She calls both the religious and secular variety of food advocates "locavangelists" and argues that secular locavangelists like Michael Pollan and Colin Beavan "draw heavily – and largely unconsciously—from the deeply rooted American tradition of evangelicalism." Wheeler cites the common ground of an emphasis on the "born-again" stories that dominate the genre, a common sense approach to life that echoes evangelical common-sense approaches to the Bible, and a focus on the conversion of individuals as key to ushering in the longed for kingdom of healthy food, communities, and land.

I find her arguments provocative and compelling but I'm not convinced yet of her diagnoses that recent events like 9/11, the commercialism of the 90s, and recent economic collapse are the perfect storm that has led to this embrace of food practices as a secular and spiritual discipline. I am inclined to look back further on the historical time line to the 1960s for the source of these recent trends but it's true that more recent events have served as catalysts for launching agrarian food perspectives into the mainstream. Her three historical markers are all subjects of the story I tell about our family's journey in Year of Plenty.

While I have some reservations about Wheeler's historical analysis, I completely agree with her philosophical observation that this secular and sacred trend is motivated by a desire to integrate belief and action. She writes:

The writings of locavangelists, of the lefty and Christian Agrarian variety, are rife with professions about the incongruity of belief and action. All the authors considered here write of the impulse to bring belief and action together....So, I think there is something of a widespread re-alignment of values going on, with many people opting to focus their energies on the familial and the local, shunning the plastic and the consumerist, and seeking above all, the authentic, however that might be constructed. Beavan, the No Impact Man, writes: “I want my work to align with my values. I want to write about what’s important. I want to help change minds. The blurb for Year of Plenty (by Goodwin, the Presbyterian pastor) announces, this is the story of “one family wrestling with what it means to re-integrate life and faith.”

Along with her historical assessment, Wheeler offers an observation about an American embrace of "practice." She writes in her introduction of the paper:

What locavores on the left and right seem to have in common is their emphasis on the importance of practice. It seems to me to be a commentary on what many now see as the superficiality of the 1990s....I find it fascinating, that a predominantly Protestant country has suddenly discovered “practice.” I don’t know quite what to make of this: it could be a response to the broader political and cultural forces, or it could suggest the assimilation of important religious ideas and practices from other religions. Americans are clearly hungry for practical guidance: Michael Pollan’s prescriptive book Food Rules, was quickly vaulted to the top of best-seller lists. Americans seem to want to be told what to do and many are finding new spiritual rewards in practicing the discipline of eating according to Pollan’s rules. Locavorism may well be the new Kosher, but it is being embraced with evangelical fervor.

This paper raises some important questions: Could food practices be the next big thing in the spiritual disciplines and practices of American Christians, especially evangelical Christians? In a fragmented culture where people have a growing awareness of a disconnect between belief and action, could food lead the way to more authentic and integrated experiences of faith? Given the common ground between evangelicals and their secular foodie counterparts, could food practices be a productive place of dialogue and faith sharing for American Christians who are often lacking generative places of engagement with non-Christians? 

These are all questions that motivate me as our family launches the Tables of Plenty project. For a culture that is hungry for "food rules" I suspect the church has a rich history of practices to draw from and share. I also believe that evangelical Christians, who are especially prone to being trapped in the modern divide between spirit and material realities, have something to learn from secular and religious food practitioners about the journey of integrating faith and action in the world. I'm excited to dive into these issues in the coming year.

You can read Wheeler's paper in three installments: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Picture: Polish priest blesses baskets of food on Holy Saturday before Easter.

Note: This is also cross-posted at the Tables of Plenty blog. In case you're wondering, I will be sharing some posts between this blog and Tables of Plenty but over time I'll share fewer and fewer posts between the two blogs.

Introducing "Tables of Plenty": A Yearlong Exploration of Christian Food Practices

It's a new yearlong adventure for the Goodwin family and a new blog called "Tables of Plenty" to connect with others around the themes of food and faith. Go here to see the new blog.

Starting on November 28, 2011 with the Orthodox Nativity fast, our family is dedicating a year to explore the role of food in Christian spiritual formation, one month at a time. Our monthly excursions will include following kosher food laws and eating in the tradition of the early church. We'll plant community gardens with the Benedictines, go vegetarian with Seventh Day Adventists, and vegan with the Orthodox. We'll even explore the spiritual depths of potlucks and jello-salad with our own tribe, the White Bread Protestants. We'll be reading, reflecting, blogging, and eating our way through the year at the Tables of Plenty blog.

It was almost four years ago that I started blogging about our family's Year of Plenty in which we committed to consuming only items that were local, used, homegrown, or homemade. Here's the linkto the first blog post with pictures of our fated attempt to make a flamingo pinata. It has been four enriching years of learning and writing about food, agriculture, consumerism, the environment, and faith. Our YoP experience has led to wonderful friendships and conversations that have sparked our imaginations for more learning and more exploration, especially when it comes to the role of food in Christian faith practices and spiritual formation. 

In recent years I've been struck by the strong connection between faith formation in the Bible and food practices. I've developed what I call a foodie hermeneutic of the Bible, reading the Bible through the lens of food and food practices, and I've been amazed at how central food is to the unfolding story of God's people in the Bible. It starts with the words to Adam, "You are free to eat," and ends with the grand vision of a feast. From manna during the exodus to Jesus fasting in the wilderness to Peter's hunger-induced vision of unclean foods in the book of Acts, the path to following God's will is often negotiated at some point on food's journey from field to table.

In contrast to this prominent role of food in the Bible, I've been surprised by the relative absence of food as a means of spiritual formation in my experience as a Protestant, evangelical, North American Christian. I never thought much about it until our YoP experiment led us into conversations with locavores, slow food foodies, vegans, sustainable agriculture activists, and others who all seem to understand the powerful role of food choices in the formation of a person. In these communities we have found people fleshing out the meaning of life and embracing food as a central practice in that process. While most of these movements are considered "secular," they often have a sacred feel to them.  

For example Novella Carpenter writes in her book Farm City about her experience raising a pig named Harold:

Although I usually call myself an atheist, a lonely universe offers little comfort to a person confronting death...But to hold Harold, this amazing living creature, to know that his life force would be transferred to me in the form of food, felt sacred.

Michael Pollan writes at the conclusion of The Omnivore's Dilemma about a dinner with friends that he calls the "perfect meal":

The stories, like the food that fed them, cast lines of relation to all these places and the creatures living (and dying) in them, drawing them all together on this table, on these plates, in what to me began to feel a little like a ceremony. And there's a sense in which the meal had become just that, a thanksgiving or a secular seder, for every item on our plates pointed somewhere else, almost sacramentally, telling a little story about nature or community or even the sacred, for mystery was often the theme. Such stories food can feed us both body and soul..."

Bestselling books like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, preach the gospel of food as spiritual formation and the message is resonating.

Alexander Schmemann, a prominent Eastern Orthodox theologian sums up this situation well in his book, For the Life of the World:

Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence. To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that ‘something more’ is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.

Just as our Year of Plenty experiment was launched out of a desire to answer questions about how our faith speaks into contemporary issues around consumerism, this Tables of Plenty project is motivated by a desire to answer questions about how our faith speaks into these contemporary conversations around food. With Michael Pollan and Novella Carpenter, we have a sense that there is something sacred about what we eat and we suspect that there is a rich Biblical and historical tradition in the Christian faith that has been mostly lost in current expressions of church. Like so many, we are hungry and thirsty for a sacramental life, so we're going to read, and explore, and eat our way through the year, hoping to reconnect with sacred food practices and maybe even help others do the same.

Each month we'll focus on one historic tradition and eat all of our food according to those rules. Here's the calendar so far:

December - Eastern Orthodox Nativity Fast

January - Getting Kosher with Jewish Food Laws

February - Eating With the Early Church

March - Fasting with the Desert Fathers, Ascetics, and Monastics

April - Celebrating the Eucharist and the Lord's Supper (Roman Catholic Tradition)

May - Seeking Social Justice with the Mennonites

June - Planting Community Gardens with the Benedictines

July - Eating Vegetables with the Seventh Day Adventists

August - Harvesting with the Hutterites (and Amish)

September - Soul Food with the African-American Church

October - Potlucking with White-Bread Protestants

Along with eating we'll be reading and reviewing books, sharing recipes, and hopefully making new friends to gather with around the table.

We also hope to crowd-source this endeavor. Please let us know if you have recipes, experiences, or insights into the role of food in Christian spiritual formation. Is there a unique tradition that we've left off our calendar that we should explore? Are there books that you would recommend?

As was the case with the Year of Plenty, it's hard to say at this early stage if we'll be successful in carrying this plan to the end. We may run into unexpected roadblocks that require adjustments along the way. Noel, Lily, and I have committed to taking on a larger role in the kitchen and I'm excited to expand my culinary skills. I'll continue blogging here at Year of Plenty and sharing some content between the two blogs.

You can follow Tables of Plenty on Facebook and Twitter. I'm still working on getting the RSS feed up and running.