What Does Faith Have to Do with Food?

What does faith have to do with food?

Deuteronomy 8:2-10, John 6:53-58

August 9, 2015

Church of the Redeemer UCC, New Haven, CT

Ian Skoggard

Would I be wrong if I told you that we all have a love-hate relationship with food?Be honest, now! I certainly do!In fact my relationship is totally dysfunctional!I have appetites and cravings that control me, albeit some times more than others! I am always bargaining with myself. Trading calories. How many to consume. How many to burn off. There are apps now which allow us to do just that! Exchanging sweets for exercise. I binge then starve. In the morning a slice of toast will do, or nothing at all. Good start?Not really!By lunchtime I am starving and end up having a humongous stuffed pork burrito with everything. By the time I get home after work, I am hungry again and begin to forage in the kitchen. Out comes the cheese and crackers, chips, mixed nuts, olives, whatever I can find that will go well with a glass of wine or beer which I then pour for myself.By the time my wife Hilary comes home, I am full! “What’s for dinner, honey?” I groan!

So any thought of eating lightly that day gets sizzled on the back burner. I am only fooling myself to think that I am in control of my eating habits. Rather my cravings get the better of me and I let them. God could have been talking to me in the passage we just heard from Deuteronomy, admonishing me for my obsession with food.Ian!"One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord."How true, God!"One does not live by bread alone!"I’ve heard that expression before! Very catchy! Did you say that? I thought it was from Shakespeare? But you’re right! There is a lot of more important things in life than food!Of course, we’ll die if we don’t eat food, but if manna was good enough for the Hebrews, then it is certainly good enough for me! What is manna anyway, God? Mushrooms? Some kind of fungus? I did read somewhere that they ate locust in times of famine. I was in China for locust season. They weren’t bad, fried up with a little soy sauce. Soy sauce makes anything palatable. Did the Hebrews have any soy sauce? You can see where this conversation is going! Endless bargaining.

“One does not live by bread alone.” There is a hidden danger in this saying. Because of the way our brain works with its on-and-off switch, either/or dualistic logic. We might interpret these words to mean that bread, or food, does not matter at all. Foodis not important. Rather, it is only our spiritual life that counts, period! And not this material world, not our bodies, not our flesh. However, in the same passage, God does paint an idyllic scene of the Promised Land:

[A] land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity...You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land that he has given you.

Clearly God recognizes the importance of food as substance, as a necessary part of a good life.Jesus' depiction of the Eucharist in the other reading we heard this morning invites his disciples to eat his flesh and drink his blood is very graphic representation of food as substance. The sacrificial image conjured up by those words sears our brain and we find it difficult to separate the substance from the promise of everlasting life. And I don't think we are meant to.Both substance and spirit matter.They are entwined.One rooted in the other.

Food!I love it and hate it!I gorge one day and starve the next. One moment, I am an ascetic and the next, a gourmand. But there is hope for people like me!We are in the midst of a food revolution that is trying to reconnect us to healthy food both materially and spirituallyand make us whole again. And it is happening right here in New Haven. We see it in the farmers' markets, in the urban gardens, in farm-to-table restaurants, in the healthy lunch food programs in our public schools (thanks to Michelle Obama.)We go to farms to pick apples, strawberries and raspberries. We go there to reconnect and find a balance, a middle way. Hopefullywe are gaining a healthier, more wholesome, and holier attitude towards food.

But this revolution only affects a small portion of the world. Our global food system is still broken. There are nearly a billion people who do not have enough to eat and a billion who are overweight. How mixed up is that? The country with the highest rates of obesity and diabetes today is Mexico, believe it or not, a country where the consumption of soda pop has sky rocketed. One cause of this brokenness is how removed many of us have become from where food actually comes from and how it is made. We have become separate from the sources of food at our own peril. In today’s modern world, food is something we pick off the supermarket shelf and purchase. Food has become a commodity, what the environmentalistWendall Berry calls the great superstition of our consumer age that “money brings forth food.” As a commodity food is subject to the whims of marketing that shape and process it in ways that are not necessarily goodfor us.

Some would say it is a good thing. The division of labor has allowed for progress and civilization. It has allowed for urbanization and industrialization.But there are pitfalls, because in separation, we have lost control of what we eat, and by default let others make choices for us, which are not necessarily in our best interests. We have chickens that are de-beaked and never see the light of day, feed a steady diet of steroids and antibiotics to make them grow quickly without getting sick. To supply us with French Fries, potato growers first kill whatever is in the soil with multiple applications of herbicides, then multiple applications of fertilizers, chemicals so deadly that farmers will not enter the field for days after its application for fear of harming their own health.

In the marketplace, the profit motive reigns: buying cheap and selling dear. Food is grown and processed to minimize costs, often at the expensive of nutrition. Food producers are more concerned about the shelf-life and transportability of food than taste and nutrition. Whatflavors they do favor indulge our craven desire for sweetnessand saltiness, both having detrimental health effects.

The theologian NormanWirzbaexplores the theology of eating in his book “Food & Faith” and calls for a new food narrative that goes beyond the brand names and grocery store shelves, reconnecting us to Creation.He writes: “Despite what food marketers may say, there really is no such thing as “cheap” or “convenient” food. Real food, the food that is the source of creaturely health and delight, is precious because it is a fundamental means through which God’s nurture and love for the whole creation are expressed (p. 2). ”He says that “Eating joins people to each other, to other creatures and the world, and to God through forms of “natural communion” too complex to fathom (2).”“To eat,” he says, “is to savor and struggle with the mystery of creatureliness (4).”

Wirzba also warns us that “When food consumers lose the practical connections that bind them to the social and ecological contexts that make eating possible, the potential for varying kinds of injustice grows dramatically (21).” One example he gives is this:

[R]ecently, countries in Africa have been under significant pressure to accept genetically modified wheat despite fears that genetically modified organism (GMO) seed will contaminate African fields and compromise traditional varieties, and thus make African farmers dependent on multinational corporations that hold the patents to the seed and control the fertilizer and herbicide inputs that make the seed grow. (22)

(You did not think I would preach a sermon on food and not talk about GMOs, did you?) The producers of GMO seeds say that GMOs are needed to feed the world’s hungry. It is an emotional appeal to us who are used to seeing awful photographs of bloated, starving children around the world. But most GMO crops never get to those children. In Iowa, corn is king and most if not all of the corn grown there is genetically modified. However, most of the corn, fifty percent,goes for animal feed, twenty-five percent to make ethanol, and the remaining twenty-five percent is processed into high fructose corn syrup.In fact most of the corn grown in Iowa is not fit for human consumption, much less food for the hungry of the world, because it has been genetically altered to produce its own pesticide and is registered by the USDA as a pesticide. So when biotech/chemical companies say that GE crops are needed to feed the world don’t fall for that old saw.

In fact, the world produces twice the amount of food necessary to feed its population. In this country we waste 40 percent of the food we produce. The rest never gets to the people who need it most, the hungry and starving, because they cannot afford it. GE crops are not any cheaper to produce. World hunger is not a production problem, it is a poverty problem that requires structural changes, not technological fixes. Infact, GE crops will lead to greater poverty and inequality as only rich farmers with capital and credit can afford to purchase the seed, herbicides and fertilizers, necessary for production. In the recently published papal encyclical on the environment, the Pope does not say much about GE crops, but the one thing he did say was that it could lead to more land concentration and inequality.

Feeding the poor is a structural problem not a technical one.To think otherwise is to shun the difficult choice and go for the seemingly quick fix.In his book, “Stuffed & Starved,” author Raj Patel writes about the choice made by the state of Kerela in India to opt out of the Green Revolution back in the 1960s, instead seeking a political solution to the state’s poverty. They implemented land reform and universal education. Today, the state of Kerela has the highest level of literacy and life expectancy in the country.

So what does faith have to do with food? I hope your answer will be “everything”! In God’s Creation everything is connected into one complex whole. That is what makes it holy and sacred. In our flesh and body we are part of Creation as is thefood that sustains us. Food nourishes us but also connects us symbolically to Creation and each other. Jesus reminds us of this when he invites us to the communion table. The bread and wine are symbols, yes, but they are food,too—no denying it—something we put in our mouths and into our bodies. God wants us to embody our faith. And what better way to do that then at the communion table. Symbols point in both directions to the physical and spiritual, real and ideal, mind and body, this world and the next, life everlasting, the resurrected Christ, the word incarnate, “both/and”. The challenge of our faith to hold it all together in our imagination. Amen