HOW WE EAT! How we love to eat... ...chocolate, roast beef, apples, potato salad, corn on the cob, tomatoes, pecan pie, deviled eggs, onion soup, fried rice, broccoli, sourdough bread, cheddar cheese, honey, bacon, French toast, peas, lemon meringue pie, chocolate chip cookies, pizza, pheasant under glass, oranges, hot dogs, trifle, Hungarian goulash, shish kebab, hummus, Peking duck, borscht, scallops, peppers and peaches and peppermint stick ice cream, Brussels sprouts and bananas and baked beans, blueberries and black-eyed peas and Boston cream pie, haggis, flamingo tongues, elk droppings, rat fetuses, the stomach contents of seals, dancing prawns, English style swan, ants, snakes, and ten thousand other foods that people somewhere on earth are enjoying right now. None of these things--some of which we will find appetizing, some of which we will find unpleasant to contemplate taking into our mouths, and some of which we have never tasted-none of these things, alas, will be on the menu at the coffee hour today. But they can be found in a restaurant or a food store or in some natural setting if we want to seek them out. We eat almost anything-one of my children used to eat socks and apple cores and chicken bones. We eat almost anything because we know the truth of Mark Twain's observation that "anything is edible if it is chewed finely enough." And if we add seasonings we can make the most unpalatable dish seem interesting. And if we are hungry enough, we will even eat our own flesh. How we love to eat! How we love to think about eating! At a recent ministers' conference, one of our number gave a self-description as a compulsive overeater, always thinking about food even when not eating it. One of the first thoughts of the day for some of us is: what shall we eat today? And once we have eaten, what fun it is to remember and think about what we ate. Nancy Arnold, writing about food as power, observes that "approximately 85% of American women and at least 63% of American men" are obsessed with food and eating. Every year or so, the Sunday supplement magazine Parade devotes a whole issue to writing about what we eat. Time and other newsweeklies often have feature articles about food and most newspapers have food editors. The New Yorker devoted the entirety of its August 19 and 26 issues to food. Several days ago I counted 34 magazines devoted to food at the Borders magazine rack, from Eating Well to Cooking Light, from Real Simple to Gourmet, from Barbecue and Beverage to All About Beer. The New York Times Book Review section today has a cover review called "Stuffed to the Gills" about a book called FAT LAND. There is a food channel on cable television and chefs are hosts on several popular TV shows. Ogden Nash captured some of our fascination with food in his poem The Clean Platter: "Some singers sing of ladies' eyes, and some of ladies' lips, refined ones praise their ladylike ways, and coarse ones hymn their hips. The Oxford Book of English Verse Is lush with lyrics tender; A poet, I guess, is more or less Preoccupied with gender. Yet I, though custom call me crude, Prefer to sing in praise of food. Food, Yes, food, Just any old kind of food. Pooh for the cook, And pooh for the price! Some of its nicer but all of its nice. Pheasant is pleasant, of course, And terrapin, too, is tasty, Lobster I freely endorse, In pate or patty or pasty. But there's nothing the matter with butter, And nothing the matter with jam, And the warmest of greetings I utter To ham and the yam and the clam. For they're food All food, And I think very highly of food. Though I'm broody at times When bothered by rhymes, I brood On food. Some painters paint the sapphire sea, And some the gathering storm. Others portray young ladies at play, But most, the female form. 'Twas trite in that primeval dawn When painting got its start, That a lady with her garments on Is Life, but is she Art? By undraped nymphs I am not wooed. I'd rather painters painted food. Food, Just food, Just any old kind of food. Let it be sour Or let it be sweet, As long as you're sure it is something to eat. Go purloin a sirloin, my pet, If you'd win a devotion incredible; And asparagus tips vinaigrette, Or anything else that is edible. Bring salad or sausage or scrapple, A berry or even a beet. Bring an oyster, an egg, or an apple, As long as it's something to eat. If it's food, It's food; Never mind what kind of food. When I ponder my mind I consistently find It is glued On food. George Bernard Shaw was right-"there is no love sincerer than the love of food." How we love to think about eating! How we love to worry about eating! Through most of human history, life was for us as it still is for most of the earth's creatures, "an unending and totally involving quest for food." Over the last century, even as the human population has swelled to more than six billion people, the problem has changed somewhat. There are today about 1.1 billion people who are genuinely hungry and about the same number of people who are unhealthfully overweight. Americans lead the way in the latter category. With food enough to feed everyone in this country several times over, even subtracting our food exports, we are bombarded constantly with urgent messages that tell us to eat and drink and then do it again and yet again. Snacking has become a regular fourth or fifth or even sixth meal for many of us. Watching a film or a football game without food would be unthinkable. But we worry about the way we eat. Diet books are big sellers. Fast food restaurants have started featuring healthy choices. Anxieties are raised about whether it is safe to eat genetically manipulated food. Concerns about dangerous organisms getting into our beef have reduced the consumption of America's favorite meat. A cartoonist takes off on the famous three monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil by showing a monkey with one hand pushing a hamburger away and the other clapped over his mouth. The caption reads, "Eat no evil." Eubie Blake caught the spirit of our anxiety about food and drink in a wonderful song of the early 20th century called Some Little Bug Is Going to Find You Some Day. Here are the first and last verses. "In this age of indigestion It is oftentimes a question As to what to eat and what to leave alone; For each microbe and Bacillus Has a different way to kill us, And in time they always claim us for their own. There are germs of every kind In any food that you can find In the market or upon the bill of fare. Drinking water's just as risky As the so-called deadly whiskey, And it's often a mistake to breathe the air. Some little bug is going to find you some day, Some little bug will creep behind you some day, Then he'll send for his bug friends And all your earthly trouble ends; Some little bug is going to find you some day... ...All those crazy foods they mix Will float us 'cross the River Styx, Or they'll start us climbing up the Milky Way. And the meals we eat in courses Mean a hearse and two black horses So before a meal some people always pray. Luscious grapes breed 'pendicitis, And the juice leads to gastritis. So there's only death to greet us either way. And fried liver's nice but, mind you, Friends will soon ride slow behind you And the papers then will have some nice things to say. Some little bug is going to find you some day, Some little bug will creep behind you some day. Eat some sauce, they call it chili, On your breast they'll place a lily; Some little bug is going to find you some day." As the 20th century wore on, concern about what we were eating increased till a few years ago Jeremy MacClancy could claim that "food...is today's Public Worry Number One." How we love to worry about eating! We love to eat. We love to think about eating. We love to worry about eating. Of course, even if we did not enjoy food and drink, or think about it much or ever worry about it, we would still have to eat. That is part of our animal nature. But we are different from our cousins in the animal community because food has a larger value for us than just taking in nourishment. Food to animals is just nourishment. That is why we say that animals feed, getting the necessary stuff they require for life, whereas we speak of human beings eating, an act that has both nutritional importance and symbolic significance. How we eat tells us a lot about who we are. Ludwig Fueurbach famously observed "we are what we eat" ("Der Mensch ist was er isst"). In the crudest physical sense this is the truth. What we take into our bodies is converted into the body itself. A primitive understanding of this is why some ancient peoples would eat parts of the bodies of their opponents-such as the heart or the brain or the sexual organ-in order to have the courage or the intelligence or the virility of their enemy become part of their own strength. Remnants of that thinking remain with American men, many of whom still regard the eating of meat, especially red meat, as a way of expressing and of strengthening masculinity. We are what we eat. As one food historian puts it, "without food, we die. But for some people, food does not merely provide sustenance. It is also the very substance and fibre of their bodies. They believe they are physically made up of the staple they eat..." We are what we eat-lemon bars or crepes suzette, Big Macs or pate de foie gras, caviar or cotton candy. The gastronomic philosopher Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin pompously told his followers: "Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are." Part of what he meant was that the food we eat tells us what social and economic class we belong to. Poor folks do not dine on top sirloin and rich folks usually do not eat much macaroni and cheese. More than this, as ethnic or religious or national or regional groups we tend to eat the same foods. Lox and bagel is a Jewish delicacy. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is an English favorite. Hawaiians love poi. The Ewondo of Cameroon eat castrated male dogs. I grew up in the South on fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, and biscuits. Food plays a major role in what we do, and thus who we are. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto reminds us that it was in part a desire for spices, particularly pepper, that drove European voyagers to sail west to find a faster and less expensive way of getting them. In our own times, as we in America have rushed or been sucked into the pace of technology, we have invented what we call fast food. It has come to dominate our lives and to characterize us everywhere in the world. More than 95% of us will visit a fast food restaurant this year. One or more of the giants of this industry--MacDonalds, Burger King, Arbys, KFC--are found in almost every country on earth. Not so long ago in America, most working people and many students in America went home for their midday meal. When I lived in Germany in the early 1960's that was almost universally true there. Now, few are those who go home for lunch in either country, and many people just grab a quick bite at the closest fast food outlet. We are a people on the go, a people too busy to take time to eat slowly, a people less concerned about taste than we are about convenience and uniformity. Many of us just graze through the day, munching on nuts and chips and candies, imbibing soda pop and beer in vast quantities to keep the pangs of hunger and thirst at bay. (Interlude of an interesting statistic or two: Americans annually consume more than 190 million barrels of beer and 90 million acres of pizza.) All this may change. There is a slow food movement that began in Italy and is making some headway in this land. Roxsand Scocos, a chef and restaurant owner in Arizona, prides herself on giving patrons time to enjoy their food. There is even a restaurant in Michigan where you are greeted with the words, "Welcome to an evening of fine dining. We specialize not only in good food, but also in slow food." Even pop culture recognizes that how we eat tells something about our personality. Dr. Alan Hirsch wrote in WHAT FLAVOR IS YOUR PERSONALITY? that if you like vanilla ice cream, you will be outgoing and lively; if vegetables are your thing, you will be introspective and sensitive to others; and if you like green olives and pickles, you will be assertive in relationships. "Der Mensch ist was er isst." We are what we eat. How we eat helps to identify who we are. How we eat helps to build relationships, a sense of community. Eating helps us build a relationship at the personal level. The typical date involves eating together-at dinner, at the movies, during intermission at the theater, as a way to keep up our energy for a night out dancing, having a late night snack somewhere, or enjoying a post-coital repast. There is great erotic potential in foodstuffs. The human body, like food, can be firm, hot, juicy, soft, moist, and well-shaped. Bananas are obvious phallic symbols and D. H. Lawrence wrote a very sensuous poem about the seed- filled fig being "like a ripe womb." Eating and sexuality are enough similar that in all languages the terms of one are used comfortably to speak of the other. In English, for example, we speak of having a lusty appetite, of feasting our eyes, of eating our hearts out, of having a devouring passion, of hungering for love. As one food historian tells us, "giving and exchanging food is fundamental to any sort of human relationship in any society." The Bantu of Zimbabwe make a contract by swapping food, what they call " a clanship of porridge." We recognize people on their retirement by giving a dinner in their honor. We give state banquets for visiting dignitaries. We go out with friends to eat just to enjoy one another's company. Our celebrations of holidays, like Christmas and Thanksgiving, Passover and the Fourth of July, involve meals of some kind-feasts, ritual foods and acts, picnics. Robert Nozick believed that "eating food with someone can be a deep mode of sociability...a way of sharing together nurturance and the incorporation within ourselves of the world, as well as sharing textures, tastes, conversation, and time." Leon Kass writes of how important it is that families eat together. Fast food and TV dinners and eating on the run encourage habits of incivility, insensitivity, and ingratitude. Regular, daily family meals teach "self- restraint, consideration for others, politeness, fairness, generosity, tact, discernment, good taste, and the art of friendly conversation-all learnable and practiced at the table...prepared and shared meals still make for genuine family life, and entertaining guests at dinner still nurtures the growth of friendship." In the past year, as I thought back on the lives of my parents, one of the features of our family life that was strongest in memory was the evening meal, which we called dinner. For a while when I was young, we ate all three meals together, but when the circumstances of life changed so that we could not eat the midday meal with each other and one of us, because of school starting times, had to eat breakfast very early, the evening meal became the primary point at which we gathered as a family. Mother made certain that everybody had plenty of food that we each liked, which sometimes meant that there would be eight or ten different dishes on the table. We rarely finished our meal in less than one hour, not infrequently carrying on for twice that long. Every one had a chance to share the events of the day. My father, being a man of wit, always found a way to make the darkest happenings seem lighter or funny, and the things that happened in his day were inevitably humorous, at least in his telling of them. When one of us had a serious problem with which to deal, the meal would be devoted primarily to figuring out how to confront the difficulty. Sometimes breakfasts were a bit tense as several of us were not good morning people, but dinners were always to be looked forward to and always enjoyed. I realized when I became an adult how very important those meals were for building the community that was the family of Bill and Evelyn, Billy, Kenneth, and Bob Phifer. Those ties are firm to this day. How we eat tells a lot about our relationships and our community. A third point: how we eat is closely connected with how and in what we find meaning in life. Food and religion are inextricably intertwined. Robert Farrar Capon, an Episcopalian priest, writes about this interconnection between the material and the spiritual that "Matter is one of God's brightest ideas; and if God gets an idea, it has a bark to it. When God thinks up a duck, for example, you don't get the thought of a duck, or a plan for a duck, or the archetype of a duck; by George, you get a duck! And at the end of each day in the creation story in the Book of Genesis, God congratulates himself by congratulating the ducky things he's brought forth. He says, 'Good!...Good!...Very good!' God is the biggest materialist there is. He invented stuff. He has more of it than anybody else. He likes it even better than we do." Capon then goes on to comment that "our problem with things...is the fact that we approach almost all matter on an immaterial level...The marveling eye and the astonished heart are in short supply among us." Artichoke hearts are delicious, and hidden, and wonder of wonders we found them! Isn't a fresh tomato among the most beautiful things in creation, to look at and to eat? The cold water from a mountain stream is better than the nectar of the gods. Trout newly caught and cooked over a campfire, a fresh-baked cookie, a fine wine, turkey on Thanksgiving Day, a hot dog at the ball park, hot chocolate or coffee at the stadium, curry that makes your eyes water and your head sweat and clears your sinuses, grits, and thousands of other edible things are part of the wonder of the world we live in. Taking notice of these things is a religious act, a recognition of the world of which we are a part, created by some Ingenious Divine Figure or Randomly Evolved from some initial Big Bang, either way cause for astonishment and appreciation. To recognize these wonders, we must live as the Buddhists urge us to do, mindfully. That is not a hallmark of our society. Jennnifer Derryberry writes that "Super-sized drive-thru dinners and the off-kilter global distribution of food illustrate the daily struggle to be good to ourselves and good to each other. We overlook the fact that eating lunch at 40 miles per hour while driving back to work doesn't qualify as nurturing the body. We overlook the hunger for love and care shared by the starving child in Africa and the obese child in America. We're so often living mindlessly that we miss these connections between body and soul." That it is easy to miss the connections is why religions have used food as religious symbols, established rules for eating, and made certain foods taboo. In India, even in times of desperate hunger, Hindu law forbids the eating of cows. They wander freely, eat at will, and when old are cared for in retirement homes. Cows are treated like deities, in part because it is believed that each cow contains 320,000,000 gods and goddesses and that the god Krishna was brought up by a cowherd. Almost everywhere else in the world, the cow is thought of primarily as food, milk and meat. Bread and wine in Christian understanding function as symbols of the body and blood of their saviour. In the ritual of the Eucharist, the believer literally consumes god. The Jewish tradition requires the separation of meat and milk products, certain times of fasting such as on Yom Kippur, and not eating certain foods like pork. Blessings accompany every occasion of eating. Rabbi Shlomo Riskin wrote that "our holiness is...in how we eat...Something as basic as a Friday night meal, replete with praise to the wife, the blessing of children, songs to God, words of Tora as well as delectable food contains the unique genius of Judaism." Jains respect all life very deeply and so have strict rules to protect life from being eaten. Among these are the following: do not drink water after dark because you might swallow a small insect by mistake; do not cook or eat at night because the heat could kill insects and by mistake you could ingest one; do not eat tubers or root vegetables because there are many life-forms in them. Each of these religious traditions causes the believer to be mindful, to think about what is being done, to reflect on the marvel of food as nourishment and as pleasure, to be sensitive to the needs of life other than my own life. Food is interwoven with religion. Certainly we Unitarian Universalists believe that. The coffee hour, which we may have pioneered and that some Catholic observers of our ways regard as our most important ritual, is a vital part of our Sunday morning celebration of life. We eat together at round robins, during committee meetings, at the annual auction, and with friends within the church community. One of the central functions of the Caring Committee is to provide food: at receptions after memorial services and for people in whose families illness or some other difficulty has made the preparation of meals very hard. Like the Cadburys of England, Quakers, who took up the production of cocoa as a temperance drink, many in our ranks use food as a way to express their convictions about the world. There are vegetarians who do not think it is right to kill animals for food. There are people concerned about overeating, about polluted food products, about advertising that is geared to children to induce them to want unhealthy foods, and about the terrible imbalance in food distribution in the world that leaves more than one billion people undernourished or starving. Food and religion go together like ham and eggs, cheese and crackers, milk and cookies. How we eat tells a lot about our religious understanding. We love to eat and to think about eating and to worry about eating. How we eat helps us understand who we are, helps us to build relationships and community, and gives us a way of expressing and living out a meaningful existence. May we continue to enjoy our food and find ways to be sure that every one in the world has enough food to eat. May we find ways in which food can help us to be good neighbors to one another and good stewards of the earth. May the hungers which this sermon has perhaps stirred up with the mention of so many different good foods soon be satisfied! Scrambled eggs,, coconut cream pie, carrots, tofu dogs, black bean soup, cheese blintzes, corn pudding, piroshki, egg rolls, mince meat pie, jalapeno peppers, tuna salad, cream cheese on celery, fresh-squeezed orange juice, avocado, Kahlua pork, tacos, fried plantains, Dim Sum, English muffins, chicken noodle soup, red beans and rice, peanut butter, creme brulee... BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. FOOD FIRST: BEYOND THE MYTH OF SCARCITY, Francis Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, Ballantine Books, 1977. 2. CONSUMING CULTURE: WHY YOU EAT WHAT YOU EAT, Jeremy MacClancy, Henry Holt and Company, 1992. 3. FOODS, Ogden Nash,, Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1989. 4. FAST FOOD NATION: THE DARK SIDE OF THE ALL- AMERICAN MEAL, Eric Schlosser, Perennial, 2002. 5. FOOD IN HISTORY, Reay Tannahill, Stein and Day, 1973. 1