I heard the presiding priest pose an interesting question during his homily in mass this past Sunday: he asked us what kind of diet Jesus might have expected a Christian to adhere to…? I assume that his decision to use the word “diet” was mainly metaphorical, meant to draw out a reflection upon “the appetites” in general, and to emphasize the need for restraint among Christians regarding their indulgence in various kinds of consumption. The sad truth is, however, that I missed a few of what I imagine were his most salient points about this subject—my insistent three-year-old daughter kept trying to whisper in my ear; she wanted to tell me how much she liked the apples she was eating (we were at a very early mass and she hadn’t had breakfast yet—and, we didn’t think God would mind…).

As I strained to pick up the rest of the homily, I couldn’t help but smile over the ironic conflation of symbols and words that began to take conceptual shape in my mind: “diet”; “Christian”; “apple” and “fruit”; “ingestion”; “consumerism”…and then, “ousted” and “garden”… Was there any unifying thread I could follow through the middle of each of these? Because I’m me, I decided to give in to the impulse to reflect on it for a while; what I came up with was a work-in-progress synthesis of our cultural food traditions, what it means to consume in the West, and American ideologies of and paranoia about ingestion—each of which, I argue, formulate the basis of our relationship with the natural world.

The apples triggered my train of thought. I couldn’t help but return to the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit of Eden: this is perhaps one of the most pervasive narratives in Western culture—though rarely do we think of this story as commentary about a few of our most basic and consuming anxieties as human beings: what is and is not physically, morally and ethically permissible to eat; a grappling with the proper limits of appetite—the human need to distinguish and abide the boundaries of what can and cannot be consumed of Nature; and, how our cultural and personal eating choices define our relationship with God, Nature, and the nonhuman world.

(“Eating Out”: or Scavenging Beyond the Garden…)

Adam and Eve were warned by God not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, for if they did, they would suddenly become aware of “good and evil”—an epiphany that would cost them the ease and comfort of the happy Garden. The consequences they endured once they had eaten of the forbidden food were manifold: first, they would henceforth know hunger and pain; they would suffer death, and their bodies would be swallowed once again by the earth from which they were formed; they would be ousted from the garden, forced into what the Christian Bible termed a “wilderness”—and in that wilderness they would forage, hunt, till and plant—sweat, labor, and work the earth for food in order to survive; they would become an invasive species in the wilderness (the world outside the Garden)—scavengers, omnivores, eating whatever and whenever they could; the ground itself became cursed—God told them: “in sorrow thou shalt eat of it [the earth] all the days of thy life”; humans would know enmity and competition among themselves, and with other creatures as they competed for space and food; they would suffer greed and restlessness in trying to procure a safe place to live and enough resources to survive; and, they would suffer becoming the prey of other creatures. In the wilderness, eating became enormously complicated—because their sin had ultimately caused disharmony between human beings and the created world. Because of their sin of eating disobediently, of consuming a part of nature they were warned not to ingest, the human race was subsequently cursed with the pains and anxieties of food production and the new moral and ethical complexity of deciding how and what to eat. Or so the mythical story can be interpreted…

One might even go so far as to suggest that this myth encapsulates and deals with, in a way, a deeply rooted human anxiety about omnivorism, particularly, carnivorism. Consider: after being tossed from the garden, we understand that for Adam and Eve, food was no longer readily or easily accessible—no longer was there an abundance of food bearing bushes and trees from which they could languidly pluck their dinner; once outside the garden, the couple was forced to eat whatever they could find, which included, of necessity, other creatures. (I have not come across any translations of Genesis that suggest that Adam and Eve ate the animals in the garden…).

Metaphorically and practically speaking, it does seem that humans have always been looking for utopias where food is abundant, free, easily accessed with minimal effort, and morally and ethically uncomplicated. In one sense, we can look upon human history as a long story about the relationship between human beings and their food sources—a history of the development of easier ways to eat, and the production of greater quantities of edibles and foodstuffs. Food production directly impacts population growth and the development of civilization.

(A Wilderness of Food…)

Biblically speaking, two of the most profound consequences of Adam and Eve’s disordered act of eating that I read into this story are the creation of the “wilderness” and an abiding fracture between humans and the nonhuman world. If read in this way, the story about the Garden and the couple’s excommunication from it tells us the story of how the wilderness was created—a place that was apparently the product of disharmony—a place that, while free, was also threatening because in it, the very act of eating had been perpetually disrupted—the law of the wild was: “eat or be eaten” rather than “eat and eat alike.” These are some of the ways, at least, the Bible encourages us to think about the gravity of our eating practices, and our relationship to Nature; and, these concepts have become deeply embedded within the Western European consciousness. They continue to inform the way we think about and act towards our food and the Earth today.

In Wilderness and the American Mind, environmental historian Roderick Nash writes that the wilderness was “instinctively understood as something alien” to the first European discoverers and settlers of the New World—an insecure and uncomfortable environment against which civilization had waged an unceasing struggle; …It’s dark, mysterious qualities made it a setting in which the prescientific imagination could place a swarm of demons and spirits”; and, the Christian Bible, so central in Western European culture, was no less emphatic about these potential evils (8). For example, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the concept of the wilderness was central to the Bible, both descriptively and symbolically, occurring no less than 245 times in the Old Testament alone (13), and it is deeply significant that this faith tradition had “constituted [a] powerful formative influence on the attitude toward wilderness of the Europeans who discovered and colonized the New World” (13). In the Bible, the term “wilderness” is repeatedly associated with terms like “desert” and “waste,” terms for a “wilderness” with which the ancient Hebrews were familiar (13). However, when ancient Hebrews talk about what is antipodal to paradise, they speak of places where no rain falls, and where vegetation cannot grow—in short, places where food is hard to grow, and therefore, where life is difficult. This wasteland was historically translated as “wilderness” in the Bible, and so the word “wilderness” in European languages contains traces of this ancient waste and cursedness—an environment of hell and evil (14-15).

For Europeans familiar with the ancient Hebrew Bible and its story of the Garden of Eden, what was beyond the Garden, that cursed wilderness humans were sent to—became associated with the same desolation, suffering, evil, and fear. When the colonists arrived in the New World, the vast and seemingly impenetrable wilderness that confronted them took on the weight of this long and ancient myth—they saw the New World as a wild place, dangerous, threatening; but, if it could be domesticated, overcome and sanctified through hard labor and cultivation, they believed that perhaps there just might be a real possibility to create a piece of paradise…

The world that Westerners created as a result of their internalization of this key narrative—the myth of the lost Garden—had and continues to have far-reaching consequences which have resulted in our wanton consumption of Nature for the purpose of recreating the ease and abundance of our lost paradise; but, as Chickasaw poet and essayist, Linda Hogan writes, this mission has also resulted in a way of living in the world that continues to break the trust and relationship between humans and nonhumans that began, metaphorically, with humanity’s sense of its Fall from grace and harmony with God and the created world; as such, Hogan reiterates, “we need to rethink not only the stories of [our] culture but where the[se] stories […finally lead us], and to what ends.

To me, it’s important to consider not only the apple as symbolic of the Fall and humanity’s sin, but also, that it was the act of rebelliously ingesting a part of Nature that was forbidden that led to our metaphorical alienation from Nature–it was an act of eating that created a rift between human beings and their world–that caused the world to transform from a peaceful garden into a place of danger, and potential terror. Turning the story in this way invites, for me, new spiritual reflections on my humanity, and perhaps, upon what it means to live sacredly.

Photo: “Apple Wasteland” by DarkCtyle from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

No related posts.