“There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but the body of the Lord.

The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.

—William Carlos Williams

I’m not sure about you, but I think about food a lot. Whether we realize it or not, food tends to organize our whole day, and in many cases, entire weeks or even months. How many of us plan our week around a grocery store trip or food budget? Or spend hours a week considering a menu for dinner guests or family, and then ponder how to obtain our food supplies in time? How many of us pace our morning or afternoon schedules precisely so that we have just enough time to swing by Starbucks for a tall mocha on our way to work? So of course I think about food; but only recently have I realized that I had not really been contemplating the centrality of food in my life—I hadn’t thought about the spiritual, moral, and ethical dimensions of what I eat. So, I’d like to take some time right now to reflect a little on just one of these dimensions—the spirituality of my eating practices.

We all know a stable, healthy diet is a prerequisite for good emotional and physical health, but I hazard to think few of us consider ways in which our diet is also an important component of our spiritual well-being. There is a sacred exchange that happens between the eater and the eaten—an exchange of life energy—an exchange of sacredness and spirit, the eaten providing its own life in order to continue the life of the eater. So, every act of eating is actually a moral and ethical choice. I am continuously ordering the world according to levels of importance—for instance, what is least important is deemed edible, which means I have decided that edible things are useful, but expendable. Or at least this is one way my culture has taught me to look at and understand food—or the nonhuman world.

But, skipping over for the time being the ethics and morality of our culture’s eating habits, or the development of our food taboos and religious rituals regarding proper food consumption which keep in check the tremendous and often destructive power of the human appetite, there is one very basic principle I like to keep foremost in mind when eating: one life is being exchanged for another. It doesn’t matter what I eat—steak, salad, chicken nugget, carrot…at root, life must feed life. Considering we don’t know how to make “life” from thin air, I’d say that the ability of the earth to produce life to sustain life is quite an awe-inspiring, and humbling mystery.

This principle has made me wonder, then, whether it isn’t just plain neglectful to eat flippantly, oblivious to the gravity of what is happening during this exchange. We eat the body of the earth in order to have life. While we consider the body of Christ to be sacred because it gives us spiritual life, no less sacred is the body of the earth, which is part of the body of God, for it is fully imbued by God’s Spirit. “We come from the land, sky, from love and the body,” writes Linda Hogan, “From matter and creation. We are, life is, an equation we cannot form or shape, a mystery we can’t trace in spite of our attempts to follow it back to its origin.” Thus, to be oblivious to the presence of food in our lives, and unmindful of its origin in the miraculous ecologies of water and soil, is to be oblivious to the presence of God at work around and within us. “Everything is Maker” says Hogan, “without respect and reverence for it, there is an absence of holiness, of any God.”

In “The Pleasures of Eating,” an important essay on the ethics of food production and consumption by Wendell Berry, an academic of eating ethics and agrarian ideology, Berry outlines what I have come to think of as a decidedly spiritual problem, which is that we no longer have any real connection with the food we eat. In losing this connection, we have lost, in my mind, a profoundly important connection with the sacred dimensions of the Earth, our own bodies, and with the God that is all life. Berry argues that our alienation from our food is not a freedom, as many often suppose (less time wasted in the kitchen cleaning up, right?). But not having to think about your food, where it comes from, or the processes that have generated, prepared, and delivered it, is not liberation. Instead, it leads to complete “obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and purposes, of the life of the body in this world.”

This train of thought has led me to re-consider a simple poem I came across by Robert Frost, in which he celebrates his experience of ripened blueberries:

Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!
And all ripe together, not some of them green
And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!

Clearly, Frost is able to appreciate these small blue globes as something extraordinary and lovely through his sensorial experience of them. His body here is a measuring and equating device, providing him with a way to make meaning and “sense” from his experience of nature; in short, meaning is made through the dynamic relationship between his body and the earth. For example, he notes the berries are ripe by comparing their color with the deep blue of the sky, by comparing their size in relation to his thumb, and by attentively listening to and feeling their plump density as they drop one by one into his pail—these are the clues he uses to decide whether or not the blueberries are exceptional and ready to eat. Frost’s poem bursts with excitement in the same way the berries are ready to collectively burst with their own ripe perfection. And his close observation, experience of, and participation with the gathering of his own food brings him an obvious joy and gratitude for the blueberries and the world that created them.

I assume he has been blueberry picking before, because he expresses an awe that this entire clump or patch of berries is ripe at once, there are no green fruits. This knowledge, presumably gained from his previous experiences out gathering berries, has enabled him to feel genuine astonishment at the blue miracles before him, and has moved him to acknowledge this discovery by turning it into a poem. I can’t say I really noticed any of this the first time I read the poem, though. I wasn’t sure why he was so excited about ripe blueberries, and so the possible meanings of this short text just kind of passed me by.

Maybe the reason why I couldn’t appreciate the poem at first is because I’ve never had the opportunity to go blueberry picking, nor I have I made an effort to. While I know how to scrutinize berries in the grocery store, carefully holding their small plastic packages up to my nose as I inspect them for signs of mold or mushy brown splotches, I’m not familiar with the shape, size, or color of a berry plant. I am unfamiliar with its stages of growth, and I don’t even know how big to let the fruit get before picking it, except that I remember, more or less, how big the berries are that I see in the store (that must be as big as the fruits get, right?). I don’t know what a blueberry plant smells like, and I’ve never felt astonished to find a container full of ripe berries—all the same size and color—in the store. They are, more or less, always around aren’t they? At least, there’s always the frozen food aisle if all else fails… So I drop the plastic container, or frozen fruit bag unceremoniously into my cart and continue on my hurried way.

Wendell Berry says that once our industrialized food manufacturing has finished with them, most of us would never know that our “various edibles were ever living creatures, or that they all came from the soil, or that they were produced by work” of humans, animals, insects, birds, bacteria, and on and on down a fantastically complex and elegant chain of food production—indeed, chain of life production. “The passive American consumer sitting down to a meal of prepared fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived,” writes Berry. “The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.”

Thus, in allowing ourselves to be alienated from our food, unmindful of our eating practices, and generally severed from many of the core biological realities of our existence, we are, as Hogan warns, cut off from the miraculous, spiritual dimensions of the earth and the Spirit of life that makes it flourish. We forget that our bodies are created and sustained from the soil, water, air, and energy of the earth. The act of eating is so basic to our existence it is easy to think nothing of it, yet the simple act of mindfulness when eating can have a dramatic impact on our relationship with ourselves, with one another, with the ground of being (literally the soils that are our life—adamah), and with all of God’s creatures whose lives work in unison with our own to continue the cycles of life on earth.

So what can we do to reconcile these problems and cultivate a deeper spiritual awareness through our acts of eating? I’ll share with you some of Berry’s advice, and perhaps share a few of my own practices. To begin, the most important first step is to actively choose to be conscious of food, and to understand that “the health of the soil, plant, animal, and eater is a single concern.” Berry explains that, “Eaters…must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.” This means that we have to be consciously aware of the effects our agricultural practices have on the soils, animals, streams and rivers, and consumers of agricultural products. If any one of these components is unhealthy, then the whole system will become unhealthy as a result. For example, it is important to consider that most cattle are fed alarming amounts of antibiotics to keep them from succumbing to illnesses that are caused by the grains they are force-fed. As grass-eaters, their stomachs simply are not designed to digest grain (corn) and so they bloat and get life-threatening ulcers. They also get numerous illnesses from cruel living conditions they are forced to endure. Another enormous concern is that the bulk of greenhouse gasses (over 50%) emitted in the world are produced by animal feedlots—methane released from putrid rivers of animal waste have a direct impact on global climate change.

Or you might examine the health of the fields in which we grow our food. Many of the farm fields in central United States have been reduced to a brittle sponginess because of industrial-scale farming practices. The ground has been so leached by over-farming and the continuous re-planting of crops with high nutrient needs (like corn and soybeans) that it can no longer produce high yields without the heavy application of fertilizers—chemicals that only further exacerbate the problem. These fertilizers and pesticides, in turn, run-off the fields and enter our streams and rivers, dumping out into the Gulf of Mexico where they have created a dead-zone that is roughly the size of New Jersey. These same chemicals also leech into the ground or make their way into major rivers, entering local and regional water supplies. And then of course we consume more of these chemicals when we eat produce grown with them, or when we eat animals that have eaten this industrially farmed produce.In short, what you and I eat matters tremendously, not just to us, but to a great many other people and organisms that are simultaneously effected by our food practices and eating choices. So, if you’re interested, some other ways Berry and others urge us to increase our mindfulness about food are as follows:

* Participate in your food production
* Prepare your own food
* Learn the origins of the food you buy—buy local, organic food whenever possible
* Deal with farmer when you can—look into local food co-ops
* Learn about the best farming and gardening practices
* Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience, of the life histories of the food
species you consume

But probably the most important way to begin to cultivate mindfulness is to eat with sincerity and gratitude, “conscious of the lives and the world from which food comes.” This practice of gustatory mindfulness will necessarily lead to heart-felt action. Perhaps we should seriously think about asking ourselves, “What and how would Jesus eat?” Or, if interested in how food is involved in social justice concerns, one should definitely ponder, “Am I eating like Ignatius?”

Photo: “Blueberries” by Kimberly Snyder © All rights reserved. http://www.flicker.com/photos/hootowl/ - used with permission

Related posts:

1. Eating the Apple that Made a Wilderness
2. Hunger: A Lenten Meditation
3. Ignatius and the Mouse
4. The Gulf of Mexico, Dirty Oil, and Chickens
5. Doing advocacy in the spirit of St Ignatius