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Yesterday, we took a look at how our relationship with food has devolved over the centuries. Today, I want to suggest two other factors that have contributed to the demise of food in our culture. They are wealth and industrialization, which are of course bound up together.

Any middle school textbook should be able to document these societal changes over the past hundred years, so there’s no need to rehearse them here. What is pertinent to the topic at hand is that as we shifted (really in a short amount of time) from an agrarian society to an industrialized one, we took decisive steps away from the source of food. Away from farms. Away from ranches. Away from the land. And in doing so, a certain connection with how food arrives on our plates was broken.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no desire to turn back the clock. I would suck at farming. Somehow, I seem to have mastered the art of being able to kill any green growing thing. My lawn being exhibit A. If my family were dependent on my being able to harvest the bounty of the earth, we would all die off within the year.

That being said, it doesn’t change the fact that I (and we) suffer from a sense of disconnectedness when it comes to actually having to be aware of where food came from.

Add to this more and more expendable income as well as increasingly inexpensive food, and you can begin to see an exceptionally strong trend towards taking food for granted. When we don’t feel like the obtaining of food came at any great costs to ourselves, then we fail to appreciate it.

And yet, food looks destined to remain relatively inexpensive. Are you aware of the massive amounts of government subsidies paid to food growers? I realize that this is a complicated issue and that there are probably valid reasons for this being the case, but just know that our tax dollars are spent to insure that food stays cheap.

Don’t believe me? Time to get a wikication.

Our addiction to cheap food is bad. It is bad for small farmers. It is bad for nutrition. It is bad for developing countries. And it is bad for the planet. We get a cheap loaf of bread, and everyone else gets the shaft.

And yet the ills of industrialization don’t end there. Since America’s motto when it comes to food seems to be “we want cheap food and we want it fast,” we’ve grown accustomed to food that has been highly processed for our convenience. Again, doubt it? Today, count how many time you get your food out of a cellophane bag, wrapper, styrofoam, bottle, can, drive-thru window, plastic cup. Not that processed food is morally evil (despite its being nutritionally evil). The more subtle impact of reaching into that bag of Doritos is that it psychologically (and dare I say, spiritually) removes us from the source.

Contrast this bleak picture with another (yet, no more appealing) scenario. A small farming family in a developing country sits down at the end of hard day’s work to their dinner table. Most of the their efforts have either gone directly to putting food on the table or working elsewhere in order to be able to eat that day. A disproportionate amount of their time, energy, and money has gone to the provision of a meal that is probably identical to the one they had the day before. They say a blessing. Not as a ritualistic precursor to digging in, but out of deep sense of gratitude that they are blessed enough to have food that day.

I don’t envy their circumstances.

I do wish I had a keener appreciation for the connection between the plate of food set before me and the gracious love of a God who provides.

The problem as best I understand it is that we think too much of food and not enough of it. I purposely wrote, “and” not “or.” Because we do both. Simultaneously.

Pick your 80’s poison…

The Police

Madonna

First, we have a tendency to exalt food to idol-like proportions. We think it is all-important. We fantasize about food. We talk about food. We write about it. We eat food. We are predictable creatures and we want a steady supply of food coming our way, and get frustrated when we don’t get it.

And it isn’t just that we want it consistently, but we want it like we like it. We want it healthy or not. With sauce or without. Lots of meat or none. Fresh veggies or none at all. Thick crust or thin. With fries or without. Well-done or rare. All of us have our particular tastes and our tastes are always right. Without exception. We obsess over food.

Today, when I picked up my son from school, he asked me the question that he asks me most days, “What are we having for dinner?” This was one of those rare times that I actually was able to tell him. “Pasta,” I say. Which elicits from him (and the younger siblings) a “YESSS!”

Honestly, that is his response most days, regardless of what I tell him. I’m not sure he is celebrating what we are eating as much as he is excited that we will be eating. Just like the day before. And the day before that. It is like a surprise every time. “Yes, food… again!”

Of course, his obsession with food is forgivable. Bless his growing-by-leaps-and-bounds adolescent body. He simply can’t get enough food in him to keep up with the rate at which his inferno-like metabolism is burning through the calories.

And yet, his obsession is also our obsession. But we don’t have the convenient excuse of adolescence to explain away our preoccupation with food.

However, I also said we don’t think enough of it. Neither what we are eating. Nor of the value of eating itself. This is going to get a bit complicated, but my own belief is that this has come as a result of a rise in a dualistic way of understanding the world. It is a view that drives a sharp division between that which is physical and that which is spiritual. To quote the all-knowing Sting, “we are spirits in a material world.” And in a world-view that has largely done away with the spiritual, then really it is Madonna who speaks on behalf of society, “You know we are living in a material world, and I’m a material girl.”

I realize that citing Sting and Madonna (in the same breath, no less) calls into question the validity of the entire post. However, when you take the materialists approach towards food, then it distorts its significance in both directions. Food is all important, but its only value is that it is fuel for the body. So really, it doesn’t matter what you eat, how you eat, when you eat, who you eat with, why you eat. All that is important is that you eat. Like I said, we both blow the importance of food out of proportion and cheapen it all at the same time.

By the way, if you doubt at all that this is in fact the majority opinion as it relates to food, you can see the same phenomenon as it relates to sex. Reduce sex to a purely physical thing, then you and I become first-hand witnesses to how societies both obsess over it and cheapen it… again, simultaneously. But that’s another series for another time.

So, let’s review…

Food.

We think it is too important.

And not important enough.

P.S. I think both Sting and Madonna are full of it. We are neither simply spirits in a material world, nor is the material world all that there is. Again, we’ll have to postpone my amazingly insightful comments on dualism as it is expressed in the media. Don’t lose too much sleep over it.