Kerux: a portfolio of Calvin Theological Seminary - Volume 41.14 - 12 March 2007

Eating, Ellen Davis, and economy

by Brian Bork, Guest Writer

The statistics are staggering, and hit with the jolt of a stun gun:

Ok, I admit it. I made those statistics up. For some reason, the real stats, though just as staggering and certainly no secret, don’t leave us aghast. The gravity of the situation demands an accounting, an analysis, or to use the apropos language of sailors, a “dead reckoning.” Briefly considered, our consumptive habits have deleterious consequences for most every aspect of our lives and the life of the planet. Consider:

  1. We participate in a food economy that encourages over-consumption and waste. The American food industry produces a 3800 calorie per diem for every man, woman and child, but few of us own up to eating much more than the American Medial Association-approved 2000 calorie daily allotment. How can we account for this discrepancy without admitting to gluttonous or wasteful behavior?

    The massive consumption of food by the individual is also linked to the fact that food is consumed individualistically. The logic of the drive-thru and the microwave dinner is one that divorces consumption from community. We can now eat, clam-shelled in the solitude of our cars, and as quickly as possible, with all the grace and manners of a starved wolf. Viewed from a Darwinian perspective, this method of consumption perhaps sates our deepest and most primordial desire for self-preservation: we can now ensure our survival by cramming ourselves to the gills without having to worry about competition from the rest of the herd.
  2. We participate in a food economy that is terribly unhealthy. The last three decades or so have seen a concomitant decline in the nutritional and natural portion on our plates and the ascent of necrotic obesity, diabetes, cancers and heart disease.
  3. We participate in a food economy that fosters invidious cruelty. To say that the industrial farming system echoes the logic of the assembly line is true, but an understatement. To say that it operates on the logic of the extermination camp is just as true, and much more apt.

    This cruelty applies not only to our livestock, but to the environment as well. Industrial farms - those behemoths of acreage and manure - lead to the desecration of space for wild things, insofar as they pollute our waters, poison our air, and flatten our forests. They thrive on mono-cultural growing techniques, and deplete the natural richness of the soil.

    The industrial farming system also implicitly pits humans against each other. The supposed (and dubious) benefits of unmitigated capitalism aside, the unimpeachable fact remains that much of the food we consume is produced by farmers from the developing world who’ve been forced into wage-slavery. Our penchant for cheap coffee, cheaper bananas, and even less expensive Big Mac beef ensures that the farmers of the Southern Hemisphere are kept on the hook of insupportable debt by North American corporations. Back home, the situation for farmers looks grim as well, when we recognize the fact that the small family farm is quickly becoming an anachronism.
  4. Our participation in the American food economy denotes a hatred of the past, insofar as it discourages traditional methods of food production, preparation and preservation. Who needs to learn to cook when we can microwave or hit up the drive-thru on the way home? Who needs to preserve summer tomatoes when we can use our corpulent disposable incomes to pay four dollars a pound for an ambiguously tomato-like globe of translucent pink at the Meijer?

The urge to continue this disquieting litany lingers, but perhaps it’d be best to consider something approaching a solution. That the ramifications of the current food economy affect people, industry and economy the world over requires a solution that is expressly political. But when the regnant orthodoxy of our political elites encourages us to consume more and more, what chance is there that this issue will be addressed by those with the power to make broad and sweeping changes? If the government is willing to forsake an ethical look at over-consumption because it may impede economic “progress” and embolden the terrorists, to whom may we turn?

I’d say that we should turn to that other great sponsor of public morality: the Church. The politics of food isn’t a popular subject for the Sunday morning sermon, but a few weeks ago the scholar Ellen Davis preached a fine sermon in the college’s Fine Arts Center on the ethics of eating. Rooted in the sixteenth chapter of Exodus, Davis demonstrated how the “manna economy” of God is an illustration of the presence of the glory of the Lord. “When God shows up,” claimed Davis, “we all have what we need.” Sadly, she noted that our contemporary food economy does much to tarnish this glorious expression of God’s providence and faithfulness. When we hoard and binge, we are expressly stating that we don’t believe that God will provide for us.

I was moved by the sermon, and underscored her words with a bold-faced Sharpie “AMEN” in my notes. The truths proffered weren’t pie-in-the-sky sentimentalities, nor escapist “I’ll fly away” treacle – this was practical theology – the faithfulness of God manifest in the very basic act of eating. We often say that we can know the truth of God in our hearts, but this sermon showed that we can understand God’s truth in our bellies, too.

It was a shock, then, to speak with my friends after the sermon to hear their less-than-enthusiastic appraisals. I’ll let them air out the details of their objections elsewhere in these pages if they wish, but here’s a small glimpse of the issues at the core of their dissenting opinions: The message was good and all, but it was essentially a political one, emblematic of the feel-good liberal messages proffered in mainline Protestant churches. It was not so much a sermon as it was a lecture. They asked, “where was the gospel presentation?”

Whether in theory or in practice, we in Reformed circles have this penchant for constructing theoretical but impractical dualisms: body and soul, church as organism and institution, sanctification and justification, priest and politician, and sermon and stump-speech. The criticism of Davis’ sermon exemplifies the last two quite well. Whatever the theoretical use of these dichotomies, they all collapse under siege of slight scrutiny; in the case of Davis and her sermon on the food economy, this is manifestly obvious. The four problems with the food economy outlined above (and lamented by Davis) all have profound theological relevance, insofar as they are quite descriptive of the strained relationship between humanity and God, and humanity and God’s creation. Consider:

  1. The Bible does not countenance the practice of usury and great and perpetual accumulations of property; it takes no feat of reasoning to see how such prohibitions can easily be applied to our over-consumption of food as well. In addition, the act of over-consumption and waste is a tacit refusal to participate in the Manna economy, which demands reliance on God for our daily bread. It is to deny the fundamentally Christian pledge to be content in the knowledge that God will provide what we need. To over-consume is to deny that God’s gifts are equitably and adequately distributed; it is to say that we know our needs better than God does, and that we are at liberty to supplement his gifts as we see fit.

    The decline of the practice of eating in community also has profound theological implications when we remember that the most powerful and binding form of community on earth – that is, the Body of Christ – is constituted through a meal. If the Christian community can be seen as a model for other forms of communal interaction, then it stands to reason that there is a degree of holiness in all community. The grace and inspiration of the Holy Spirit pervades all human interaction, allowing us to live in harmonious concert with each other. To forsake community by retreating into the solitude of the quick meal in front of the television is to rebuff the work of the Spirit in our lives that seeks to bring us together. One despairs even more when one considers how the North American penchant for the “single-serving” and the “individually-packaged” has crept into our churches as well. How many of us find something lacking in a Eucharistic celebration composed of Wonderbread croutons and thimblefuls of grape juice, consumed by silent parishioners stuck like corks in the pews?
  2. The unhealthy quality of our diets implies an accepted dualism between body and soul that is not a part of proper Reformed theology and is certainly unbiblical. Occupied by the habit of grooming our souls for that glad morning of assumption, we willingly desecrate the body with the conspicuous consumption of fats (trans. and sat.), carcinogenic chemicals, and gonad-mutating hormonal supplements. In the contemporary Christian life it is all too often the case that the soul gets the spiritual spa treatment, while the body, on account of its frail transience, is subject to a punishing regimen of consumptive feats. In his exploration of Genesis 2.7, Wendell Berry writes that the breath of God “is only one of the divine gifts that makes us living souls; the other is the dust.” Our dualistic thinking that permits us to disown the dust through unhealthy eating is not only self-destructive and self-hating, it is, in the words of Berry “to make nothing – and worse than nothing – of the great Something in which we live and move and have our being.”
  3. The environmental and human desecration engendered by our food economy is an assertion that the only value in creation is that assigned to it in the ways by which we profit from its use. The great mandate of Genesis 1.28 has been twisted and turned into an insipid rationalization for the legalized vandalism of creation. Environmentalism and its relevance to our habits of consumption is not just a political issue. It is an expressly theological issue: all creation, deemed “good” by God, is holy (a point stressed by Berry, Blake, Dante, and St. Paul). To misuse creation then is to misuse God’s good and holy work. It is to fling back his good gifts. It is to move beyond “bad stewardship” and into the realm of blasphemy.
  4. Finally, the disappearing traditions of food production and preservation have theological ramifications as well. What’s at stake here, theologically speaking, is not so much a healthy understanding of where our food comes from, as important as that may be. What’s at stake here is the intelligibility of the Bible. To even the most elementary student of the Bible, it is plain that many of the lessons therein - contained in parables and poetry - are agrarian in character. The growing ignorance that many of us have of the production of food foreshadows a time when much of scripture will be unintelligible, written as it is in the patois of “outdated” economic and culinary practices.

In considering these arguments, it becomes apparent that Davis’ topic was entirely appropriate for a sermon. To argue otherwise – to argue that the “politics” of her material don’t fit in the context of a sermon is to bifurcate the theological and the political, which can only be done at the peril of a coherent worldview and understanding of the intimate and inextricable interaction between creation and creator.

What about the claim that the Gospel was absent from her sermon? I’m not sure what to make of it, because I think that a Gospel message was presented in the claim that the glory of God is made known through the Manna Economy. That the glory of God described in Exodus 16 is visible in bread sent from heaven is foreshadowing in the narrative that culminates in the Gospels, when Christ tells us that he is the “Bread of life.” Davis’ claim that when God “shows up,” we have “what we need” is so thoroughly supported by the Exodus 16 story that it really doesn’t need any supporting evidence, but the Gospels take it one step further – the manna in the wilderness was temporal, and the Israelites were hungry again. The bread of life given to us by God in Christ is such that we will never be hungry again; it is in Christ that our hunger pangs are satisfied, once and for all. Could Davis have presented the Gospel more clearly? If someone would argue at this point that the bread referred to in the Gospels is a spiritual metaphor and can be extracted from a discussion of the ethics of eating, one needs to revisit the Magnificat of Mary to realize that God “filled the hungry with good things” - no metaphor intended. There is no reason to suppose that Christ does not enjoin us to do the same.

Earlier in the essay, I stated that I would consider something approaching a solution. I’m not sure I’ve done so, except perhaps by raising the issue of the ethics of eating, and demonstrating its intense theological relevance. I think that theological contemplation of the issue can do wonders, but I think it necessary to propose other practical solutions to the problem. I’ll do so in a subsequent essay. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this passage from Wendell Berry’s essay Christianity and the Survival of Creation, which is broad in scope but intensely relevant to our economy of eating. It’s troubled my thoughts for some time now, and maybe it will trouble yours as well:

“The Bible leaves no doubt at all about the sanctity of the act of world-making, or of the world that was made, or of creaturely or bodily life in this world. We are holy creatures living among other holy creatures in a world that is holy. Some people know this, and some do not. Nobody, of course knows it all the time. But what keeps it from being far better known than it is? Why is it apparently unknown to millions of professed students of the Bible? How can modern Christianity have so solemnly folded its hands while so much of the work of God was and is being destroyed?”