Five suggestions for a personal philosophy of food …

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You’ve probably never thought about food being a “holy and humbling mystery,” but Norma Wirzba has.

Here’s how Wirzba stirs us to think more deeply about food as she writes in “Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating”:

    Food is a holy and humbling mystery. Every time a creature eats it participates in God’s life-giving yet costly ways, ways that simultaneously affirm creation as a delectable gift, and as a divinely ordered membership of interdependent need and suffering and help. Whenever people come to the table they demonstrate with the unmistakable evidence of their stomachs that they are not self-subsisting gods.

    They are finite and mortal creatures dependent on God’s many good gifts: sunlight, photosynthesis, decomposition, soil fertility, water, bees and butterflies, chickens, sheep, cows, gardeners, farmers, cooks, strangers, and friends (the list goes on and on). Eating reminds us that we participate in a grace-saturated world, a blessed creation worthy of attention, care, and celebration.

    Despite what food marketers may say, there really is no such thing as “cheap” or “convenient” food. Real food, the food that is the source of creaturely health and delight, is precious because it is a fundamental means through which God’s nurture and love for the whole creation are expressed.

    … To eat is to be implicated in a vast, complex, interweaving set of life and death dramas in which we are only one character among many. No matter how solitary our eating experience may be, every sniff, chomp, and swallow connects us to vast global trade networks and thus to biophysical and social worlds far beyond ourselves. The moment we chew on anything we participate in regional, geographic histories and in biochemical processes that, for all their diversity and complexity, defy our wildest imaginations and most thorough attempts at comprehension.

    The minute we contemplate or talk about eating, we show ourselves to be involved in culinary traditions and cultural taboos, as well as moral quandaries and spiritual quests. To amend an ecologist’s maxim: we can never only bite into one thing. Food is about the relationships that join us to the earth, fellow creatures, loved ones and guests, and ultimately God. How we eat testifies to whether we value the creatures we live with and depend upon. To eat is to savor and struggle with the mystery of creatureliness.

Maybe you’ve never considered crafting a “theology of food” like Wirzba has, but let me encourage you to at least consider putting in place a simple “philosophy of food” for your personal nutritional practices and habits. Here are five suggestions as starters for your philosophy.

1. Adopt a soul-deep philosophy that there is no food on this planet worth your health. This is an essential belief because we’re literally killing ourselves with food. Our choices of what we eat, and the volume of food we consume — just because we love it so much we actually worship it — is ruining the health of millions of Americans. But just imagine yourself on your deathbed in a hospital, with weeping family members gathered around; chances are you would, at that moment, soundly believe to the depths of your soul that the food that robbed you of your health wasn’t worthy of it. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying food, and discovering pleasure in it, but there’s a lot wrong with harming yourself with what you eat, and the way you eat. Once again, there’s no food on this planet worth your health!

2. Food is delicious! But it’s fundamental purpose is as fuel for your body. Make that a cornerstone belief in your personal philosophy of food and you’ll be in a position to make better decisions about what and how you eat. So many people have forgotten that the most basic purpose of food is to fuel our body with what it needs. Food provides our body with essential nutrients. Nutrients are substances that provide:

    • Energy for activity, growth, and all functions of the body such as breathing, digesting food, and keeping warm;
    • Materials for the growth and repair of the body, and for keeping the immune system healthy.

The problem many people have with food is that they make delighting in food their primary approach to what and how they eat, and make fueling the body with essential food secondary (if they even think about it in those terms). We need to turn that around – first, properly fuel the body with healthy nutrition, and learn how to enjoy doing that.

3. Food is not medicine, but it does impact our health for better or worse. Jillian Kubala, MS, RD, writes the following for Healthline:

“What you choose to eat has profound effects on your overall health. Research shows that dietary habits influence disease risk. While certain foods may trigger chronic health conditions, others offer strong medicinal and protective qualities. Thus, many people argue that food is medicine. Yet, diet alone cannot and should not replace medicine in all circumstances. Although many illnesses can be prevented, treated, or even cured by dietary and lifestyle changes, many others cannot.”

Your stewardship of your body is directly impacted with the choice of every meal you eat. Are you influencing health or healing with your choices? Or raising risks to your health? Key to health isn’t perfection and never eating a favorite “treat,” but consistently making food choices that contribute to health and healing.

4. Food IS a great platform for fellowship and generosity. With 1-3 firmly in place, we can more safely do some wonderful things with food, like use it to enrich fellowship with others or as a means of extending generosity to others. Many of our most cherished times with family, friends, or people who have touched us deeply have included food or have been times of sharing a meal or gathered around the kitchen table. We live in a culture where people don’t want phone conversations, they want text messages … and yet multiple nations are reporting a pandemic of loneliness. Perhaps we need to extend our generosity and invite fellowship more than we have been. Bringing people into your home for a meal, or even dining out with friends, or making new friends while dining out, can be wonderful times for building new relationships, nurturing old ones, and creating opportunities to open the door for sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ.

5. A meal that centers Christ in us. Food is so central to our human existence is it any wonder that Jesus chose bread and wine — a simple meal — as a means of not only centering our lives on Him, but centering Him in us?

“For I pass on to you what I received from the Lord himself. On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took some bread and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces and said, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, he took the cup of wine after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant between God and his people — an agreement confirmed with my blood. Do this in remembrance of me as often as you drink it.’ For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord’s death until he comes again,” 1 Corinthians 11:23-26.

Perhaps Wirzba was right, food is a holy and mysterious thing.

Scotty