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Increase Awareness | Publications| Food & Faith | Intro
Food As Sacramental
by Mike Schut
A
Pilgrimage: Coming Home to Eat
I grew up in southeastern
Minnesota. Mom and Dad grew up on farms where they learned to garden and to
work hard. As adults they planted huge gardens every spring and had no
qualms about working their children hard. Picking green beans—knee-high,
bushy plants with large green leaves meant (it seemed) to conceal the skinny
green beans growing at backbreaking levels—was the worst. My sisters, Lynn
and Katrina, and I felt those rows upon rows of green beans were
interminable. Had my parents forgotten they were no longer farming? Had they
missed the fact that there were only five of us to feed? Were they unaware
of child labor laws? In contrast, tomatoes—sporting large, red fruit against
green vegetation—seemed well worth the effort.
Describing tomatoes as “well worth the effort,” however, is a bit like saying Yosemite or the Grand Canyon are “worth seeing.” Southeastern Minnesota is prime tomato country, featuring that wonderful combination of summer heat, humidity and rich soil that each year miraculously turns little seeds into the rich-est of fare.
As early August rolled around, Mom or Dad gave periodic “tomato progress reports.” We knew when those first few blushes of red appeared, and when we might expect to taste the first of that year’s crop. The occasion of harvesting the first ripe tomato was a significant calendar marker: Katrina’s birthday is in January, Mom’s in February, mine in May, Lynn and Dad’s are in June, tomatoes ripen in August. That first tomato was both highly anticipated and anxiety provoking: though all five of us were raised to be generous, we also definitely wanted to get our one-fifth share. Among other genetic similarities, each one of us cherished fresh garden tomatoes as a favorite food. Even when there were enough for breakfast, lunch and dinner, I remember furtively watching the tomato platter as it was passed, challenging my sisters if they exceeded their fair share of the best slices. I know I was also under their surveillance.
I now live in Seattle, Washington where I tend a small backyard garden. I grow tomatoes, though they never really taste as sweet, rich, or complex as the ones from home. I usually make it back to Minnesota during August for the tomato harvest. It’s a comforting time to be at home. I feel nurtured not only through being “back home” around Mom and Dad, but through their garden’s bounty.
My August trips in some ways resemble a pilgrimage. Pilgrims travel to kindle their connections to a sacred place and thus to nurture their relationship with the divine. Their journeys bring them, if not to a physical home, then to a “home within,” a restful, familiar, healing place that reminds them of who they are. The sacred site to which I return is connected to my roots. My body remembers the feel of the garden underfoot, the aroma of mom’s cooking, the crickets at night, the wall of heat and the colors and tastes of garden-fresh meals.
Those tomatoes become not only food for my physical self, but a symbol of the ways in which we as a family seek to care for each other and a reminder of the connections between us. So it is not difficult to remember that, no matter my parents’ gardening skills, our sustenance ultimately depends on the Earth’s fertility: a gift. From there a simple prayer of gratitude seems the most natural thing. In a way the tomato becomes sacramental, not in the formal sense as part of the liturgical rites of the Church, but as a “sign or symbol of a spiritual reality” (to quote Webster).
Food As Sacramental
Seeing the tomato, a common food in many meals, as potentially sacramental is not a stretch when recalling Jesus’ last meal with his friends. At dinner, Jesus took bread and wine, the commonly available, everyday elements of a meal in that time and place. He then broke the bread and poured the wine both to remind his disciples of his life and teachings and to serve as an invitation to follow his acts of love and compassion. It is not accidental that Christ chose a meal for the setting and bread and wine as the symbols for instituting what has become the most central of Christian sacraments. The settings and elements of everyday meals carry within them a kind of “sacramental power.”
This book invites you to explore and celebrate food’s sacramentality. In doing so, the book looks beyond the food itself to examine how it grew, was processed and made its way to our table. Wendell Berry summarizes this perspective beautifully:
We can [not] live harmlessly or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation. The point is, when we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament; when we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration…in such desecration, we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.1
“When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament.” Berry is suggesting that we can be blessed with sacramental moments when we “break the body and shed the blood of creation” in a certain way: more knowingly than ignorantly, more lovingly than greedily, more skillfully than clumsily, more reverently than destructively.
In suggesting that food can be sacramental, this book recognizes that, in the Christian tradition, the Church formally celebrates seven sacraments. (Protestants generally have two sacraments, Communion and Baptism. Catholics have these two plus five others: Confirmation, Reconciliation, the Sacrament of the Sick, Ordination, and Marriage.) But the Christian tradition also celebrates informal sacramental moments in everyday life. Consider the apostle Paul speaking to the Athenians in Acts 17: “God…is not far from each one of us. For in God we live and move and have our being.” It’s as if all of us are swimming in God’s presence. In such a world, the holy is never far off. In such a world, “church isn’t the only place where the holy happens. Sacramental moments can occur at any moment, any place, and to anybody. Watching something get born. Making love...Somebody coming to see you when you’re sick. A meal with people you love...If we weren’t blind as bats, we might see that life itself is sacramental.”2
This book understands sacrament in this broader, less formal way. It sees the eating, procuring and growing of food as sacramental, ushering an awareness of “the holy” into everyday life. It sees in the need to be nourished daily the larger spiritual reality of our dependence on mysteries that we do not fully understand.
My Family and Farming
Other relationships, besides those with my immediate family and their tomatoes draw me back to Minnesota where most of my extended family lives. I feel rooted in this landscape, nurtured by lasting ties to family, friends, and the land itself. I feel at “home,” which is not surprising considering my roots. My paternal grandparents, Henry Schut and Hazel Dalman, called the rolling hills, lakes and dairy country of central Minnesota home. Grandpa was born, reared and lived for sixty years in his family’s farmhouse, on land farmed by his family for over seventy-five years. Henry Van Roekel and Wilma Van Ommen, my maternal grandparents, were born in the corn, hog and soybean country of southeastern Iowa. Grandpa was born in the house where he lived for the first seventy years of his life. The land he farmed was in his family for over one hundred years, one of Iowa’s “century farms.”
All of my grandparents grew up speaking Dutch and attending the Reformed Church. Sunday was always a Sabbath, reserved for rest and worship no matter the work left undone in the fields or the barn. There was a certain rhythm and regularity imposed on them by the farm, and a certain rhythm and regularity to their faith tradition, in some ways imposed on them by the culture in which they lived.
Each of the two families raised six children. Of these twelve, not one became a farmer. Not one of my aunts, uncles, or twenty-seven first cousins were able to purchase the family farms; none of us wanted to, considering the economics of farming today. Both sets of grandparents eventually sold their land to neighbor farmers needing more acreage. I carry a deep sadness that the land no longer belongs to the family.
The sadness is personal. I have lost a connection with a landscape that still in my bones feels very much like home. Though I probably could still become a farmer, learning to farm from my family on their land is no longer a possibility. The sadness is also ecological: modern crop farming and animal production is much more destructive of topsoil, water and wildlife than the methods my grandparents learned. The sadness is also cultural: modern crop farming and animal production is much more destructive of rural community than the scale and type of farming my grandparents employed.
Both my personal and my family’s experiences—fewer and fewer farmers, larger and larger farms, a more distant relationship with the land that sustains us—mirror changes occurring around the world, and especially in the United States. These personal experiences therefore connect to many larger concerns related to our society’s distance (even alienation) from our food, farmers and land: those concerns include ecosystem health, rural economic viability and the spirituality expressed in personal and cultural relationships to food.
Looking Further
This book explores a broad range of food-related themes. Many of these are reflected in my own family’s stories. First, like my tomato pilgrimage, a number of the themes can help reveal the sacramentality of food. Second, like my extended family’s farming history, several of those themes connect to the decline of the family farm, the reasons for that decline and the impacts it has on rural communities, the environment, migrant workers and farm animals. The sacramentality of food is reflected in this book’s emphasis on celebration, communion and gratitude.
Celebration
Food adds joy to life.
Meaningful, hilarious, community-enriching, soul-satisfying times are so
often associated with a shared table. Close friends, candlelight, homemade
bread, a meal prepared together and a prayer of thanks. Or a big party,
potluck, the plates not big enough for all the variety, the second helping
of those par-ticularly tasty dishes, the familiar voices and laughter. Or a
favorite holiday meal, feeding body and soul. The stories and settings are
endless, but at each occasion the gift of food mediates a larger reality—the
sanctity, preciousness and joy of life.
Communion
“To live, we must daily break the
body and shed the blood of creation.” Daily we participate in the mystery of
other beings becoming part of our very tissue. And daily we have the
opportunity to experience food as a sacrament, where the appropriate
metaphor for food is not fuel but rather communion: with those family and
friends sharing the meal, with those hands whose skill helped grow and
harvest the food, with other creatures and ultimately with our Creator.
Communion in the Christian tradition also connotes the liturgical celebration instituted in remembrance of Jesus’ last meal with his disciples. Just after college I spent a year as a resident manager at Samaritan Inns, a ministry of Church of the Savior in Washington, DC. I lived with formerly homeless men for a year. We ate our meals at Christ House, a thirty-four-bed medical recovery home for homeless men. Christ House held weekly worship services in their dining room where Holy Communion was celebrated each week. Those of us able to stand and file to the altar did so; others wheeled themselves.
One Sunday especially the “line-up” hit me. There’s Don, a man in his 50s, a walking miracle, recovering from alcoholism and homelessness. There’s David, the highly talented, well-educated and compassionate co-founder of Samaritan Inns. There’s Carlton, a man in his 40s, angry with me because of the position of authority I have as the resident manager of his home. There’s the elderly woman whose financial generosity helped make Christ House possible. There’s David, a medical doctor on the Christ House staff who struggles mightily with his own depression. Rich and poor, young and old, black, white and in-between, sick and well, each in their own way recognizing their need for reconciliation and relationship with God and others, celebrating God’s presence. Sharing bread and grape juice. The Kingdom of God is here, I thought. And the Kingdom of God will be like this: Communion.
Gratitude
Eating can nurture gratitude.
“When we eat,” Sharon Parks writes, “we must very soon eat again. If we dare
to contemplate fully the act of eating, we will be led to the unavoidable
awareness of our continual desire to live, and also our utter dependence
upon the generosity of the Earth and its peoples and the power and grace by
which our lives are sustained.”3 Thus, in the presence of a meal,
we bow our heads. In receiving the gift of “our daily bread” we are reminded
of our ultimate dependence on God’s provision for this life and of the
miracle of sun, water, seed, soil, and air contributing to what becomes
food.
My extended family’s farming history also connects to this book’s emphasis on healing divisions, agriculture’s environmental impacts, the explosion of industrial agriculture, political activism, and hope.
Healing Divisions
Generally speaking, Western
culture does not see the words food and faith as closely related. For most
of us, food comes from the supermarket (often diced, sliced, packaged and
frozen beyond resemblance to anything living), not from the farm or the
Earth. We live in a time when it is possible for children gardening in the
inner city to refuse to eat the fruits of their labor, not wanting to eat
anything that “comes from dirt.” In addition, for many of us faith is
relegated to a Sunday morning ritual, compartmentalized from the rest of our
lives, having little impact on everyday choices such as food.
Environmental educator David Orr writes, “Our alienation from the natural world is unprecedented. Healing this division is a large part of the difference between survival and extinction.” This book seeks to help heal a number of “divisions,” including: the division between the foods we eat and our knowledge of how those foods impact not only our own health but the health of the rest of the natural world; the division between faith and faith’s call to care for all creation and the division between food and faith.
Environmental Impacts
On some level we are all aware
that eating ties us directly to Earth. Anything that so connects us to the
natural world has significant environmental impacts. As Wendell Berry says,
“How we eat determines to a considerable extent how the world is used.” The
accuracy of his statement is corroborated in the 1999 book The Consumer’s
Guide to Effective Environmental Choices. This well-researched book
highlights those choices that individual consumers can make to decrease
detrimental impacts on the environment. Rather than getting bogged down with
detailed questions: paper or plastic? cloth diapers or disposables?, the
book focuses consumers’ attention on those choices that really make a
difference.
Their findings? Two of the top three “most harmful consumer activities” involve what we eat, and where and how it is grown. The most harmful [individual] consumer activity: cars and light trucks. The second most harmful: meat and poultry. The third most harmful: fruit, vegetables, and grains. How we eat really does significantly determine how Earth is used. Their suggested “priority actions” for American consumers are to eat less meat, and buy certified organic produce.4
Let’s consider their first suggestion, eating less meat. In the United States it takes 2,400 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef; over 70 percent of the U.S. grain harvest is fed to livestock each year, the majority of it to cattle. There’s more, but you get the picture (simply eating one less quarter-pounder a month saves 600 gallons of water).5
Industrial
Agriculture
The word “agriculture” refers to
the culture that develops from the cultivation of land. Over the last fifty
years that culture has changed dramatically. Corporate management has
significantly replaced family and community stewardship. What often became
an art form attuned to the complexities of local climate, soil, seasons and
family knowledge has been largely replaced by agriscience and agribusiness,
attuned to Wall Street, competition, and the bottom line. In the process,
monocultures, petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, “factory farms”
and soil erosion have greatly reduced the use of crop rotation, organic
fertilizers, and animal and soil husbandry.
These shifts in agricultural practices are intricately connected to the increased ownership of agricultural land by multinational agribusiness corporations. Corporations are either less willing or less able to care for the long-term health of land than small-scale family farmers, concerned about passing the land on to their children. Between 1910 and 1920, the United States had 32 million farmers living on farms, about a third of the population. By 1991, the number was only 4.6 million, less than 2% of the national population.6 These statistics begin to suggest the extent of the change in the “culture of agriculture.”
Wendell Berry suggests that such a culture produces “industrial eaters,” who may think of food as an agricultural product, but who do not think of themselves as “participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as passive consumers.”7 Passive consumers no longer know those who grow their food, or even how or where it was grown. When, as in the example of the young inner-city gardeners, our understanding of the source of our food is limited to “it comes from the supermarket,” we do not know its geographical derivation or remember its ultimate dependence upon the fertility of the soil. Thus, we cannot know how healthful such food is for us, for the land, or for those who grew it.
On the other hand, if we begin to think of ourselves as participants in agriculture, we might begin to ask questions. Where and how was the food grown? Are those who planted, tended and harvested our food treated as pawns in the global food economy? Or do they own their land and are therefore more likely to care for its long-term health? To realize that our food choices influence not only our own health, but also the health of the land and rural communities, is to move toward taking responsibility for our participation. In accepting such responsibility, we honor those community connections that bring us our daily bread. With this awareness comes the possibility of eating more sacramentally, fostering healing.
Political
Activism
It ought to be clear by now that
Food and Faith is not only about individuals making changes in daily food
choices. The book also recognizes the importance of political activism
leading to systemic change. Both individual and systemic change are
essential; to debate which is the more effective seems pointless. For
example, if enough individuals choose to boycott eating “factory-farmed”
animals, the system would find a way to meet the demand for meat raised more
humanely and with less environmental impact. A similar result could be
achieved through the application of political pressure. For example, taxing
the owners of such factory farms to cover the costs of adequate animal waste
disposal would increase the cost of the meat. Individual consumers would
then begin to shift their meat-buying habits in order to get a better price.
Various essays highlight the necessity of working at both the individual and systemic level. In Section 2, Marion Nestle emphasizes that individuals need to be educated about how to eat well, and that political pressure must be applied to combat the food industry’s marketing of foods high in salt, sugar, and fat. In Section 9, Mittal and McGovern point out that addressing hunger is not only about growing enough food for individual consumption, but also requires the political will to ameliorate poverty.
Hope
Industrial agriculture’s
influence on the food we eat, on its nutritional value, on ecosystems around
the world, on migrant workers, on the treatment of animals, on the viability
of rural farm communities can become overwhelming. Looking clearly at those
realities is a necessity if we are to help create systems that value the
integrity of creation. But shifting our gaze to see and celebrate the
hopeful stories of individuals and agricultural systems which recognize that
the eating, procuring, and growing of food can be sacramental is just as
important.
Throughout this book, and particularly in the final section titled “Stories of Hope: Promising Directions,” you will find examples of individuals eating, cooking, growing, and shopping for food in ways that are healthy for people, value the importance of clean water and healthy soil, pay farmers a fair wage, treat farm animals well, keep farmland protected from urban sprawl and support local agriculture rather than distant mega-farms. In various essays and within the Study Guide you will find suggested, “doable,” small action steps you can take in your personal life that reflect a sacramental view of food.
Coming Home to Eat
I began this essay relating my experiences of returning home to eat, and how I am more than physically fed at such times. If we are fortunate enough to have a good home, we return there not only to eat, but also to be nurtured in a variety of ways. One of the ways we know we are home is through the food prepared for us. In the biblical story of the prodigal son, a young man takes his father’s inheritance, quickly exhausting it on “reckless” living. Destitute and desperate for food, the son decides to return home. He plans to simply ask his father to treat him like one of his hired men, who at least are well fed. But the father, upon seeing his son, runs to him, kisses and hugs him, clothes him, kills the “fatted calf” and throws a feast. The feast’s significance becomes clear if we try to imagine the story without it: if, say, after kissing, hugging and clothing him the father had said, “Welcome home—help yourself to what’s in the fridge.” The feast is a sign that the son is loved, forgiven, welcomed and truly “home.”
There are other meanings within the phrase “coming home to eat.” Gary Paul Nabhan spent a year eating foods that grew no further than 250 miles from his home. He titled his book about that year Coming Home to Eat. Most broadly understood, coming home to eat recognizes Earth as the home God created for us and all creatures. To eat in such a way honors and cares for the breadth of God’s creation.
This book raises significant social and ecological concerns. If we are to live and eat in ways that will begin to ameliorate those concerns, the most fundamental shift we must make is a spiritual one. The essence of that shift is to live as if the Earth “is the Lord’s” (Psalm 24:1), not a treasure chest for human plunder. Put differently, we must act as if our home is a sacred place, and remember that our faith traditions not only affirm that God is transcendent but also immanent, very near. Biblical scholar and Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard puts it this way in the introduction to his book Human Image: World Image:
‑We are treating our planet in an inhuman and god-forsaken manner because we see things in an inhuman, god-forsaken way. And we see things in this way because that is basically how we see ourselves... [we] look upon ourselves as little more than two-legged animals whose destiny and needs can best be fulfilled through the pursuit of... self-interest. To correspond with this self-image, we have invented a worldview in which nature is seen as an impersonal commodity, a soulless source of food, raw materials...which we think we are entitled to exploit and abuse by any technique we can devise....8
Significantly, in the epilogue to Coming Home to Eat, Nabhan comes to a similar conclusion: “If we no longer believe that the Earth is sacred, or that we are blessed by the bounty around us, or that we have a caretaking responsibility given to us by the Creator...then it does not really matter to most folks how much ecological and cultural damage is done by the way we eat.”9
Finally, if this book is an invitation to come home to eat, to remember food’s sacramentality, then everyone is invited—farmers, environmentalists, corporate executives, grocery store clerks, migrant workers, economists, theologians, artists, politicians, truck drivers, scientists and activists (not to mention the whole host of God’s other creatures who also need to be fed and nurtured in this same home). We all eat and we all wish to leave our children and grandchildren a healthy world: we at least share that in common. Through individual choice and political action we must work together to create and support food systems (as well as larger economic systems) that recognize and celebrate food as sacramental.
I hope this book helps you discern ways you might embody love and compassion through your everyday food choices and see how those choices can help create agricultural and economic systems that embody love.
Notes
1. Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983, 1981), pp. 272-281.
2. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 82.
3. Sharon Daloz Parks, “The Meaning of Eating and the Home As Ritual Space,” from Elizabeth Gray, ed. Sacred Dimensions of Women’s Experience (New York: Roundtable Press, 1988), pp. 184-192.
4. Michael Brower and Leon Warren, The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices (New York: Three Rivers Press, Crown Publishers, 1999), pp. 50, 85.
5. Alan Durning and John Ryan, Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, (Seattle, WA: Northwest Environment Watch, 1997), pp. 54-55.
6. Wendell Berry, “Conserving Communities,” Orion Magazine, Summer, 1995.
7. Wendell Berry, “The Pleasures of Eating,” in What Are People For? (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 145.
8. Philip Sherrard, Human Image: World Image (Ipswich, UK: Golgonooza Press, 1992), pp. 2-3.
9. Gary Paul Nabhan, Coming Home to Eat (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002), p. 304.