At the end of a journeyman's summer, I lay in an unfamiliar wood, watching the stars assert themselves upon a deepening night. My wanderlust faded into a gentle homesickness, and I dreamt of cookies, warm chocolate chip cookies and coffee, the deepest of comforts from my Christmases and homecomings. I flipped through the remembered textures and smells of soft dough and chocolate, and I was struck by the centrality of food to my story. Eating has marked my celebrations and my tragedies. Its rituals surround and define the points of reference by which I know my life, and from which I collect hints of life's meaning.
I imagine that such an association with eating is, or has been, the norm for most of us. Across cultures and traditions, the cycles of gathering, preparing, and consuming food have been occasions of ritual and storytelling. They have led to a series of practices and beliefs that ground people in their social, environmental, and existential contexts. But these connections are fading as our eating loses its grasp upon what sacred moments we have left.
Our ancestors indwelled a world flush with the sacrosanct. Hunters connected with their prey as a part of a single chain. They spoke to the spirit of the slain animal and respected its sacrifice. Farmers tended an order that both depended upon and sustained them. They danced and sang for the rain and acknowledged their place in the cycles of nature. Cooking was sanctified as communities grew and defined themselves in terms of their diets. Laws and rituals were developed to bind people together through food. And the final act of eating was sanctified as sustenance was passed between the work-rough hands that contributed to its production. Prayers were spoken and bread was broken as friends and families fed their living with a sense of gratitude.
As these relationships and connections began to be displaced by considerations of utility and efficiency, the sacred was squeezed out of our food system from the outside in. Scanning cartoon-faced packages and dropping cold-cuts into a basket is rarely occasioned with reflection upon one's place in the universe. The commodification of our eating eliminated the empathy between consumers and consumed. Chemically nurtured and internationally distributed monocropping robbed farmers of their connection with the rhythms
of the soil and their relationship with their customers. Mass-produced and nutritionally bankrupt diets broke the social ties of traditional cuisine. And the subjugation of meal-time to our commutes and our sitcoms eliminated the occasion for reflection upon and gratitude for the simple good of enjoying our food.
Our eating has been secularized. It has been robbed of its poetry and beaten into the staccato uniformity of packaged snacks. We have insisted upon efficiency as the only criterion of our culinary aesthetic. As a direct result, our prey suffer needlessly, our planet is wilting under the pressures of our demands, our neighbors are strangers, we are unhealthy, and our place in the order of things is lost behind the incessant pace of our living.
We are in desperate need of reconnecting our eating with the sacred. This needn't mean a return to the perspectives and practices of the past. It does necessarily mean a reevaluation of the fundamental principles by which we relate to our eating. It means including considerations of beauty and meaning in the design of our food systems.
Conveniently, our religious traditions are equipped with tools and traditions for just such a reconsideration. Ramadan, Yom Kippur, the Sabbath, and the Eucharist -- all opportunities for exploring and restoring connections between the sacred and our eating.
But to take advantage of this shared concern for sacred eating, we must be willing to crack open the shells that have formed around our rituals and allow them to inform our everyday living. They must be set loose on our reality so that our memories of warm cookies and coffee continue to bind together not only our own narratives, but our communities, our planet, and the thousand little relationships out of which the sacred emerges.
This is such a subtle way of saying we couldn't care less about the the misery and torture we unnecessarily inflict on billions of animals each year with our mass farming and meat packing/slaughter houses. Maybe if we passed laws that required the producers and packers to treat the animals like the sentient creatures they are and not like commodities, no more to be spared pain than a bushel of corn, we could better deserve the sustenance they provide us. (No, I am not vegetarian.)
"We must be willing to crack open the shells that have formed around our rituals and allow them to inform our everyday living." This is the solution offered? Maybe I am particularly dense today, but I don't have a clue what that means.
I think you have a very valid and interesting point in there somewhere, but it's a bit murky. Maybe you could try this again later. I'm interested to hear it.
Maybe you have a need for that but don't tell us about your imaginary being wants. Leave the rest of us alone.
The less religion the better for all, especially when one is hungry.
Eating together as a family is a wonderful experience, but -- please -- it's not sacred. We are grateful, not only to be together around the dinner table, but to live in a country where there is plenty of good food to eat, farmers who grow food (and a chef for a Dad!). No need to tack on anything else and make us feel guilty that it's not enough. It's enough for this family.
Don't worry about thanking Jesus, but thank someone.
That's not ALL! Because of secularism the ice caps are melting, the glass ceiling still exists, the world is constantly at war, children are dying, people are starving, blah, blah, blah. Oh, what's the point? You've got your preconceived notions all tightly bundled and you're not letting go. Too bad.
I still remember the first person I met who would not eat what everyone else was eating... I was 19. It was one in a hundred that was obese back then.
Houses, too. Definitely need to get rid of houses so we can reverse the secularization of habitation.
And what about the Internet? Virtual interactions are obviously lacking all the elements that make face-to-face meetings so sacred. We should probably start a Facebook page to protest the Internet and raise awareness...
“The dietary laws loom large in Jewish life. …Efforts have been made to give a rational for the dietary laws. The most persistent – hailing back to Maimonides (Guide 3:48) – is that they were originally hygienic measures…Today this explanation is often given by those who wish to discard the dietary laws… The sources, the Bible in particular, never mention such reasons. Rather, it is usually suggested that the laws have some connection with holiness. Thus we read in Leviticus: “I am the Lord your God; sanctify yourself, and be holy; for I am holy…The Torah regards the dietary laws as a discipline in holiness, a spiritual discipline imposed on a biological activity….Eating is one of the important functions of life. It begins as a biological act, a means of satisfying hunger. When we invite a friend for dinner, a new dimension is added to eating; it becomes a social act. …(To those who observe the dietary laws) eating becomes a religious act, an act of worship, with the table becoming an altar of God.” (Isaac Klein).
That said, ...
The author harks back to an idyllic and (largely) imaginary time when our ancestors hunted food and believed that what they caught had offered itself as a "sacrifice" to their needs. In this ancient time, people also believed that the world was filled with both evil and benevolent spirits, that there were no such things as natural laws, and that the world was filled with the fearful and inexplicable.
Unfortunately, going back to one major anthropomorphistic attitude about nature can't be done without several other more undesirable parts tagging along.
Perhaps the author feels that our scientific knowledge gets in the way of our spiritual senses or that our material progress as a society has caused us to be less grateful for surviving another day. Food is plentiful, people are almost guaranteed to have *something* to eat, and pure starvation hasn't been seen on a large scale in some time in the developed world. We expect to be able to eat when those in the past were often grateful to have anything to eat!
Is this confidence unspiritual? I don't think so. Maybe though we could demonstrate more gratitude for our blessings by trying to eliminate hunger everywhere. It's worth a thought.
Grabbing the sides of the bowl helps to.