“We Are What We Eat” The Rev. Rali Weaver

October 19, 2008

First Church and Parish in Dedham

A few years ago the Atlantic Monthly published a photo of an aerial view of a grocery store. The food packaged in brightly colored boxes and the shelves were stocked to the edge and I remember being astounded by the apparent endless supply of artificially packaged food. At the time I remember wondering- how can we live forever in the midst of such abundance?

I believe that our resources should have natural ebb and flow to them. Just as the ocean waves flow in and out just as the tides rise and fall, just as seasons come and go so should all things have their ups and downs. Especially food. Our food- no matter how processed- begins somewhere in nature. And all things natural have a natural season of time.

And yet with corporate farming, globalization, the mass marketing of foods, the countless preservatives used in processed foods-- the number of foods that have become available every season of the year has increased to the point that there is hardly anything food-wise at least that we have to wait for.

You don’t have to wait for summer to taste watermelon. You don’t have to wait for winter for Hot Chocolate. What you want is available when you want it.

To my mind there is something spiritually wrong with having an endless supply of anything. If it is always there how can you miss it? We need the ebb and flow to establish longing. Longing makes any meal taste better. Having whatever we want whenever you want it creates immediacy in our culture that I believe may be at the source of many of our health concerns.

Going without and striving for more can create spiritual benefit.

And yet a constant sense of scarcity, of going without, of dieting can leave us feeling hungry and unsatisfied.

We are now entering a time of diminishing resources; while the grocery store shelves may still be full to the brim- many of us need to take into account our assets before shopping. And some of our decisions must be based not upon what is seasonal or what is available or what is the best for us -but instead upon what we can afford.

And so the question today might not be how can we live forever in the midst of such abundance but instead, how will we ever be satisfied in the midst of our dwindling resources?

Part of what has defined us as a culture for many years has been this almost obsessive abundance. And part of what will make us what we are in the days to come is how we respond to our limited resources.

Now I could focus on offering you a spiritual answer to this question. I could talk about how finding some spiritual food is necessary to sustain us when it feels as though the sky is falling all around us.

Yet an answer of meditation and prayer seems a bit shallow when those in our own community are going hungry and we are all having a difficult time making ends meet.

Part of what sustains us as individuals no matter what is in the bank - is the pleasure that comes from the food we eat.

On Friday a new study that was published in the Journal of Science explored this issue of food and pleasure. The question that was being asked was: do women who are overweight derive more pleasure from food and therefore eat more? And the interesting results that have been supported by previous studies is in fact that the opposite is true. In the past overweight women were tested with pictures of food. And the MRI scans when taken with pictures of food showed that the women felt pleasure from the idea of food. In the most recent studies where the participants drank milkshakes while getting a brain scan, researchers found that some women are genetically predisposed to get less satisfaction from eating and as a result, tend to overeat to compensate.

In the context of our fast paced culture where there is hardly ever time to sit and enjoy anything and we are shamed for our eating choices, encouraged to obsess about calories and fat content and carbohydrate content we rarely take into consideration the pleasure content of the food we eat.

Amidst all the conflicting voices and needs it is difficult to prioritize pleasure in our assessment of the foods we eat. And so I wonder how many of us eat and never feel satisfied?

And when I talk of food pleasure I don’t simply mean the kind you get from eating chocolate.

Chocolate as a rule can offer the suggestion of pleasure without actually giving us any physical nourishment to live on.

There are at least two basic responses that all people who like chocolate have in eating chocolate. There is the joy. The feeling of pleasure and there is the shame- that evil chocolate.

Whether we view chocolate as a joy or an evil is in some ways a metaphor for how we view the world. From this perspective the reason we are what we eat is not because of the food we ingest but is in fact what we think and feel about that food we ingest.

I want to focus on the kind of pleasure you get from eating a good meal when you are hungry. I am talking about the kind of pleasure you get when the food you put into your mouth “hits the spot” and when it truly nourishes you.

What it takes to be satisfied is not always a perfectly prepared meal but a thoughtful one and the time to prepare and to eat it.

Too much food in our culture is prepared on the fly, fast food, and cereal or even just eating something quick without sitting at the table.

In these lean times finding rich nourishment in life as represented in our food and habits, needs to be a priority if we are to thrive.

For my conclusion I am borrowing this list from Wendell Berry a southern poet and author. Who after growing up on a Tobacco Farm farmed himself and then later became the editor of the Rodale Press the worlds largest publisher of health and fitness magazines including many pivotal works on Organic Gardening.

When asked what city people could do to help with the problem of industrial agriculture, Wendell Berry responded with this list. Not being able to improve upon his words myself I offer them to you today.

If you are concerned about the industrial complex that removes you from the life cycle of your food and thus the inherent satisfaction of a meal from beginning to end. Wendell Berry suggests these things.

1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer, Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.

2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life to the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of "quality control'': you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.

3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence,

4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing directly you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.

5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions.

6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.

7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.

I offer you this list by Wendell Berry, not because it is definitive but because it points to a solution to the problem of those excessively abundant grocery shelves. We have as a culture gotten so busied that we have lost site of what we are eating where it comes from and how it is produced.

Food comes to us mainly prepared, defiantly processed and the only way to return to satisfaction is through our education.

As we approach the harvest this year I want to encourage us all too look not only at where our food comes from but our reaction to that food.

There are countless reasons why buying locally helps us all to live more abundantly and achieve a level of spiritual satisfaction. And yet today I am not going to encourage you to buy local produce but instead encourage you to live in an attitude of abundance taking time with what you eat. Celebrating this harvest in this time of dwindling resources.

Let us look closely at the ways we nourish ourselves with food and consider food preparation a spiritual practice. And let us think creatively how to feed others and ourselves in the most nourishing ways possible in all the days ahead.

Whether you buy locally grown produce or eat at Mc Donald’s I hope you will take the time to think about how the food you eat nourishes your soul.

And if you want to know more about locally grown produce I hope you will join us on Saturday Night for the Community Harvest Dinner.

*Hymn #6 Just As Long As I Have Breath (Gray)