Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

I just learned today that Barbara Kingslover, author of the deeply moving epic work of fiction, The Poisonwood Bible, has published a new nonfiction book about one year of her family's experience moving east to farm and live off locally grown produce (think Wendell Berry of the new millenia). Her new book is titled Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.

Co-incidently, I also stumbled upon this sermon today. It was given on "Thanksgiving Sunday" by a Unitarian Universalist pastor and speaks to this issue. The spirit is moving...

Eating as a Spiritual Experience
A Sermon Givenby The Rev. Roger Frittson November 22, 1998
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist ChurchBethesda, Maryland

I live in Kensington, Maryland. According to the United States Post Office, Kensington includes everyone who lives in the 20895 ZIP Code. This ZIP Code stretches far beyond the incorporated town of Kensington, in which fewer than 2,000 people live. The boundary line for the ZIP Code cuts through the middle of our church property. This building is in Bethesda, but our Center and Memory Garden on the hill behind us have a Kensington address. For the same reason, both the White Flint Mall and the Mormon Temple have Kensington addresses.
ZIP code 20895 also extends up University Boulevard as far as Veirs Mill Road. This leads us to our claim to fame when it comes to eating. In September the McDonald's corporation announced to the world that by dividing the total sales at each of its restaurants by the census figures in the ZIP code, the Big Mac Capital of America is a McDonald's in Irwindale, California. The runner-up coming in second among all the McDonald's restaurants in the United States is the McDonald's in Kensington, Maryland. They sell 135 Big Macs each year for every man, woman and child in Kensington. 135 Big Macs a year! It is time that we who live in Kensington look at our eating habits. This morning, the Sunday before our national ritual meal of Thanksgiving, I want to talk about eating.

As a youngster I learned that dinner was a time to report about my efforts at school. I was taught that proper dinner conversation was about our endeavors during the day. My mother and father reported in about their activities at work. Meals were small scale evaluations. When I went away to study for the ministry, I shared an apartment with an Italian American named Mark. My former apartment mate later chaired the commission that created the hymnal we use each week and now is a minister in Ohio. When we were students, one of the first things Mark did when he moved into the apartment was to hang a banner on the wall next to the kitchen table. The cloth banner showed pictures of people of all different racial and ethnic backgrounds, young and old, men and women. Underneath the people was this question: "Wouldn't the world be a wonderful place, if we could all sit down and eat together ?"

While I had learned to talk about my accomplishments when we sat eating, Mark talked about the food. Eating was central to his life. He regarded food as a sensuous experience. He had strong emotional reactions to the taste of the meal. I would eat quickly and be ready to move onto doing the dishes. Mark would linger over each bite. His meal would drag on as he would describe to me the Italian names for the different ingredients and pastas. I remember one day soon after we started sharing the apartment, I came home from the library. I found Mark hard at work making his own noodles from scratch. Having always bought noodles from the store, I had no idea you could make noodles from scratch. In amazement I watched as he rolled out the dough and cut the strips.

The British-German ethnic culture I grew up in taught me that dinner was for reviewing the day and setting goals. It was not a time to look at, taste, discuss, or enjoy the food. My Italian apartment mate began to open my eyes. He helped me become aware of how food appeared, how it smelled, and how it tasted. Each day I would see Mark's banner. "Wouldn't the world be a wonderful place, if we could all sit down and eat together?" Slowly the words began to sink in. I began to see eating as a spiritual experience. I was learning to take time and to give thanks, to express gratitude for the elements of the meal.

So an Italian with whom I shared an apartment taught me to enjoy the look, smell and taste of food. A second person who has influenced my understanding of food is a medical doctor from Philadelphia named Tony. When I first met Tony, he was President of the Methodist Hospital in Philadelphia. Tony told me his story at the home of a Unitarian minister in Philadelphia. He explained that sixteen months before I met him, physicians told him he was seriously ill and was not likely to see his 50th birthday. He was forty-seven years old.

However, when I met Tony his illness appeared to be in remission. He credited his improvement in health to a change in diet. Before he became ill Tony, a single man, he ate most of his meals out at restaurants or at the hospital cafeteria. He ate mainly fast foods such as hamburgers, fried chicken, and french fries. In August of 1978, feeling desperate over his impending death, Tony decided to try to change his eating habits drastically.

The diet he tried is Japanese in origin. It consists of 50 to 60 percent whole grains, especially brown rice; 25 percent locally grown fresh-cooked vegetables, and 15 percent beans and sea vegetables. He made up the rest of the diet with soups and various condiments. To improve his heath, Tony stopped eating all meat, all dairy products, and all refined grains including white bread and flour products. He cut out of his diet all sugar, all oil, all nuts, all fruits, all carbonated drinks, and all alcoholic drinks.

It was not easy to make this change. The first time Tony tried this diet he took a cooking class to learn how to cook rice, vegetables and beans. Then he drove to the local natural food store. There he bought $150 worth of food, a pressure cooker for the brown rice, utensils, and pots and pans. When he got home, he began immediately to fix a meal of brown rice, vegetables, and beans. Two and a half hours later he finished. The rice was burned black. The beans were hard as little pebbles. The greens and vegetables were overcooked.

In desperation Tony asked the teacher of the cooking class for help. The cook and his family agreed that Tony could come to their home each evening for meals. They would provide him with a sack lunch, and soup and oatmeal for breakfast. What this doctor got was not just a change of diet but a change in life style. Before his illness he had eaten quickly and alone in restaurants. Now he sat on the floor, his shoes off, with seven other people eating slowly with chopsticks. Just before each meal the little group paused in silent prayer. Still, it was not easy to make this change. Describing the first meal Tony said: "I had not tried the seaweed yet, and finally, with some trepidation, I tasted it. It tasted like unrefined sewage."

When I talked to Tony, he had been on his diet of whole grains and vegetables for little more than a year. Gradually he had developed a taste for the new food. Although raised an Italian Catholic, Tony was an active member of the Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, attending every Sunday and serving on the Board of Trustees. Several years later he wrote about the experience:

I realized during those years that there was a deep spiritual need within me that had to be addressed. It was not until much of the fear of God I had experienced in my youth had passed away that I was able to recognize my own desire for spiritual nourishment. During my years at the Unitarian church, I had a hunger for intellectual arguments for the reality of God. I had no faith, but a desire to be convinced.

For Tony, spirituality, food and health are all part of the same conversation. Of course, one experience of improved health is not proof that a change of diet can preform miracles on everyone. If our goal is to live forever, we cannot win, no matter how carefully we eat. On the other hand if our goal is to work on our spiritual health, how and what we eat play can a role.
My own guess is that several factors contributed to Tony's improved health. One was the dramatic improvement in his diet. Another was that he ate his meals in a community of people who believed he could get well. As I listened to Tony tell his story, I became convinced that his eating a meal each day with people who loved him and had faith in his healing powers was crucial. My guess is that Tony's change in diet was part of a larger change in his life style that led to a greater peace within himself. This inner peace helped extend the length of his life.
So from an Italian American with whom I shared an apartment I learned to enjoy the look, smell and taste of food. And an Italian American doctor taught me that, in his case, changing his diet and changing the community in which he ate had a dramatic impact on his health. Today when I meet people in this church or in the larger community who are trying to improve their health by changing their diet, I remember Tony and I give them my support and encouragement.

Finally, when I think of the sacrament of food, I think of Wendell Berry. He is a writer and teacher at the university of Kentucky. He lives with his wife on a farm in the hills of Kentucky where he raised two daughters. He worked to grow much of the food his family ate on the farm. He admits that raising a family in this way is not easy. "One of the likeliest results of a wholesome diet of home-raised, home-cooked food is a heightened relish for cokes and hot dogs." The "children spurn healthy meals in favor of those concocted by some reincarnation of Col. Sanders, Long John Silver or the Royal Family of Burger." Nevertheless, Wendell believes that parents have a responsibility not to give in to the culture of fast food. He writes:
If we make our house a household instead of a motel, [and] provide healthy nourishment for mind and body . . . there is no certainty that we are providing our children a 'better life' that they will embrace wholeheartedly during childhood. But we are providing them a choice that they may make intelligently as adults.

Like Wendell Berry's children, when it comes to eating in my own life, a gap exists between my ideals and my practices. In all honesty, I find it difficult to live up to my aspirations. When it comes to food, I have achieved an existence that is far below ultimate perfection. I have even occasionally been seen in the eating in the Kensington McDonald's. In traditional religious language, when it comes to eating responsibility, I am more of a sinner then a saint.
Nevertheless, I still believe in my goals.
My spiritual health improves when I am more fully aware of the present moment. When eating I try focus on the taste of the food, and not just review the past and plan the future.
My spiritual health improves when I do what I can to maintain the physical health of my body. When eating I try to limit my intake of red meat, in favor of fruits, vegetables and grains.
My spiritual health improves when I am conscious of my connections with the world around me. When eating I try be aware of the sources of the food I eat and I try to be thankful for all that has gone into creating the meal that is before me.

In the words of Wendell Berry:
A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in our accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes . . . People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater . . . We eat with understanding and with gratitude . . . Eating with the fullest pleasure -- pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance -- is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.

I wish all of you a happy Thanksgiving. And as you eat your meals, may each of you experience eating as a spiritual experience.

Sources:Berry, Wendell, What are People For? , North Point Press, San Francisco, 1990.Berry, Wendell, The Gift of Good Land, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1981.Sattilaro, Anthony J., Recalled by Life, Avon Books, New York, 1982.