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
You may contact her at
This article is an edited excerpt from
The Spirit of Food
and is
used by permission of the author and Wipf and Stock Publishers.
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
