Cedarville Magazine, Summer 2013

Cedarville Magazine | 19 stand before is no longer a banquet table offering sustenance; it’s a minefield threatening our own destruction or the destruction of the planet. With our plate in hand, our stomachs rumbling, and our well-informed minds on alert, we survey the offerings as we walk the length of the table: that appetizer is full of trans fat; that plate of fruit is bathed in pesticides; that salad exploits migrant workers; that noodle casserole is nutritionally bankrupt; that stroganoff comes from abused animals. We are paralyzed. What do we choose? How do we eat? How do we respond as people of faith? And if we make all the right choices, will good food rightly procured and produced then save us? Even as I ask these questions, I know something is missing. Something our grandmothers and mothers knew at their church potlucks, as they carried to the communal tables Velveeta broccoli casseroles and Jell-O salads greener than any fruit dared to grow. In our zeal for purity and right living, we may have forgotten something other generations and cultures knew. That food is more than politics; food is more than economics; food is more than culture, entertainment, nutrition, even justice. As important as each of these is, none of them singly identifies or describes all that food is and does and is meant to be. Food is nothing less than sacrament. All food is given by God and is given as a means to sustain not just our bodies, but also our minds and our spirits. In all of its aspects — growth, harvest, preparation, and presentation— food is given as a primary means of drawing us into right relationship toward God, toward His creation and His people. Even its intentional absence, through fasting, pulls us toward dependence on God and one another. Leslie Leyland Fields ’79 is the editor of The Spirit of Food: 34Writers on Feasting and Fasting TowardGod . She lives on Kodiak Island, Alaska, where she and her husband, Duncan ’78, are commercial salmon fishermen. Fieldswrites about food, faith, andAlaskaat leslieleylandfields. com. You may contact her at leslieleylandfields@gmail.com. This article is an edited excerpt from The Spirit of Food and is used by permission of the author and Wipf and Stock Publishers. wipfandstock.com When I left home at 17, I did not know how to eat. The whole world became one giant cafeteria filled with new dishes and foods (real spaghetti sauce!). I saw that food could be beautiful and sensual and spiritual. I wanted to eat everything, and nearly did, trying to fill that long, deep hunger. Overeating was followed by starvation, beginning years of struggle to find a way to approach food without fear, lust, or guilt. I have been healthy for a long time now, and I have found that the food that once threatenedme contained its own seeds of healing. I feed myself and many people every day, and I labor joyfully and passionately to feed them well with homemade jellies, grass-fed beef and deer, whole-grain handmade breads. I am hardly alone in my various food pursuits. We’ve become a nation of foodies, whether the food is junk and fast or organic and slow, whether boutique fare or diner fare, comfort food or haute cuisine, whether we’re gaining weight or losing it. This national attention to all things food-related is needed and overdue. Perhaps we are revolting against the age of information that harnesses us to desks and computers for most of the day, our bodies forgotten in this bodiless realm. Many writers, growers, nutritionists, and theologians are calling us back from a kind of forgetfulness and inattention to our physicality, our appetites and our food, a neglect that quite literally threatens our health. We eat far too many meals one-handed, the other on a steering wheel. So many of us eat toomuch of the wrong foods too fast. Family dinners are threatened by our all-consuming schedules. We all know the consequences: rising rates of obesity and diabetes, the pandemic backlash of eating disorders, the projected costs to our national health, the growing toxicity of our soil and food supply. In the midst of plenty, we have forgotten how to eat, it seems. Our kids have grown up in a world where ketchup and French fries are counted as vegetables, where soda is the beverage of choice, and where meat and a gooey dessert is expected at every meal. Meal bars are increasingly replacing plates of steaming dinners and hot breakfasts. We are in the midst of a “national eating disorder,” pronounces The New Yorker magazine. If we follow the news, the best-selling books, the latest diet trend, the debates and exposés of our national food practices and production, we can feel overwhelmed. Guilty. The table we cedarville.edu/mba It’s not too late to apply for fall 2013! Equipping Christian Leaders online MBA C E D A R V I L L E U N I V E R S I T Y